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After absorbing a lot of information from a high
positioned Sony employee who worked on the
development of PS3, a university professor in Japan
spilled everything he knew to the press through the
Weekly Takarajima magazine. What Kouichi Okao knew
was much more than Sony wanted us to know. A month
earlier he revealed some information in the magazine
as a anonymous person and the magazine got into
legal problems with Sony. Apparently Weekly
Takarajima is not scared of the big bad bully, and
the professor comes out again and writes an article
revealing more insider information on Sony.
Reportedly Sony and Sony Computer Entertainment
had conflicting ideas about the Playstation 2. SCE
wanted a system that is simple as the original
Playstation was but of course with today's
technology. Sony on the other hand wanted a system
that would take over the world with features and
functionalities of a gaming system, computer, and
all-in-one home entertainment system. Looking at
Playstation 2, you don't have to be a rocket
scientist to tell that Sony got their way of doing
things on PS2. So what did Kouichi Okao reveal about
the PS3? You are about to find out.
It seems like year 2005 is the estimated time the
PS3 will be released in Japan. Sony and SCE will
both satisfy their egos because the plans are to
release two versions of the console. One is the
fully featured system with all of the capabilities.
The other version is going to be a stripped down
machine that will basically act only as a console
system. Think of the second version as PS3: Value,
because that is the idea behind it, to satisfy the
people who can't shell out over $400 for the system
and a game.
The PS3 development team is reportedly looking
forward to using a built in TV tuner of some sort to
allow the future system to record TV shows on hard
disk. Similar stand alone system are already out on
the consumer market that do the same. Some of the
products that I can think of from the top of my head
are ReplayTV and TiVo. The brilliant engineering
allows these machines to use the hard disk to save
video image using MPEG encoding and allow the users
to pause live TV, record shows for later viewing and
a few other functionalities. So evidently, the idea
of recording TV on a hard drive is not new.
Well, Kouichi
Okao gave us some real good information on what to
look for in the future. Sony is definitely taking
large steps get into the consumer entertainment
market and be everything to everyone. Will it work?
We'll have to wait for a few years to see the impact
that the PS2 and PS3 will make. For now, we can be
assured that they won't be forgetting about what
Playstation was originally all about; video gaming.
04/26/00
Webmaster
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