Sony and BT have just signed a four year deal to extend the function of the Sony PSP to have it act as a Wi-Fi video and voice ‘softphone’.
We’ve been digging a bit as the initial information offered by BT was sketchy to say the least.
Continue reading VoIP On PSP Offered By BT And Sony
Sony is adapting their idea of the PS3 online store, taking it to their handheld games machine, the PSP – in the US at least.
It’s expected that a wide variety of content could be downloaded to it – demos, full games, possibly even music and videos.
With a planned start date of Autumn, or Fall for our US readers, access will be via the handheld’s Wi-Fi, using the Web browser that comes built-in.
It’s not exactly a lightening move, given that the UK release date of the PSP was September 2005 – and that was behind the US and Japan. This was acknowledged by Jack Tretton, Sony Computer Entertainment America president, “I think the advent of a long awaited and quite frankly long overdue ability to deliver a downloadable service for the PSP will help us out a great deal.”
The Nokia N95 promises so much. It’s got every gizmo and gadget you can imagine on it, but Richard Davis hasn’t found the dream to match the reality. After you read this, you’ll appreciate that he’s not a happy chappie.
Let me set the scene as to how I came about my Nokia N95. I fell out of love with Nokia after a rather clunky experience with the N73 a while back, followed by various other niggles which led me away.
Continue reading Living With A Nokia N95: A Bug’s Life (1/3)
Large pools of envious drool and “gimme! gimme! gimme!” saliva were found dripping around the desks at Digi Lifestyle after Sony’s latest version of the superlight Vaio G1 laptop was spotted on t’web.
Previously released as a featherweight 2.1 pounds laptop sporting a 40/80GB hard drive and 12.1 inch display, Sony have just cranked up the VAIO’s desirability rating to wanton craving with the news of a 32GB Solid State Disk option.
With the hard drive ejected and replaced with super silent, super fast, super durable solid state flash memory, the laptop can now claim to be the world’s lightest 12.1-inch laptop, registering a butterfly-untroubling 1.89-pounds.
Without a hard drove rattling away inside, the standard battery life has been extended by half an hour, giving a very generous 6.5 hours in total. Users investing in the longlife ‘L’ battery can enjoy a battery life that will leave even the Duracell bunny in need of a fag and lie down, with Sony claiming a whopping 12.5 hours of use.
As well as the 1,024×768 pixel (XGA)screen, there’s also an Intel 945GMS Express video card, 2 x USB 2.0 ports, a Type2 PC card slot, memory stick PRO/DUO and SD card/MMC slots, Gigabit Ethernet, modem and voice input/output.
Its dimensions may be small (277 x 215 x 23.5-25.5mm) but the price tag is a bit of a heavyweight beastie, with the base unit starting at around 229,800 Yen – adding up to a hefty $545 premium over the 40GB hard disk option.
The news for Sony and their PlayStation 3 just keeps getting worse.
Early pre-UK-release signs weren’t promising, nor were they looking any better when the UK PS3 was selling for £100 under their release price, a couple of days beforehand.
On the positive side, Sony did claim to sell 165,000 consoles in the UK in the first week – making it the UK’s fastest selling home console to date.
Now the official Chart Track figures, that follow sales in the UK are reporting to gamesindustry.biz that sales of the PS3 in the UK have dropped by 82% during its second week of release.
Software sales are also suffering with “sales of the top two PlayStation 3 titles, Resistance: Fall of Man and MotorStorm, had dropped by over 60 per cent.”
It’s not looking much better for the PS3 in Japan, where Bloomberg is claiming that Sony has sold 812,000 PS3s since November 11, against a mighty 1.95 million Wii consoles by Nintendo.
As you know the Sony’s European edition of the PS3 went on sale on Friday with the expected effort from them and their associated PR organisations to try and make a big thing about it.
We didn’t bother covering it, as we’ve said quite a few times before, we didn’t think the PS3 was going to set the world (or at least the UK) alight.
It’s too expensive (£425 retail) and doesn’t offer the consumers enough to make it a must have – even when they’re trying to make the most out of it having a Blu-ray player.
Proof of the lack of interest can be found on UK eBay, the strongest, most immediate guide on the current market price of items.
Looking at the finished auctions, there is a sea of red prices, showing that items aren’t selling, a big “up yours” to the people who thought they were going to be buying their PS3 and flogging it on for a big profit.
The PS3 items that have sold are around £320 – £410, well _below_ the current retail price. In the lowest case, nearly £100 below – THREE days after the launch of the product. Not the normal behaviour of the public if they’re excited.
The initial signs for the PS3 aren’t going well, but Sony may well have anticipated this by re-jigging hardware design to make them cheaper in preparation of a price drop.
Sony is gearing up to launch a rival to popular online virtual world Second Life later this year. Playstation Home is a massively-multiplayer online game (MMO) in which a user adopts an avatar (a digital character which represents them) which they are then free to move around a virtual world, interacting with other avatars. In their Developer FAQs (PDF), Sony describes the project:
Home™ is a real-time 3D, networked community that serves as a meeting place for PLAYSTATION3 (PS3) users from around the world, where they can interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share content and even build and show off their own personal spaces.
It looks like Home may well be going beyond Second Life in a few areas. Gaming is the most obvious, perhaps unsurprisingly given the link to the Playstation. Users will be able to play various different arcade games around the virtual world through their avatars. So I might decide to go for a virtual drink in a virtual pub with my virtual friends, and I would then be able to have a virtual game of pinball on a virtual pinball machine. You get the idea.
Probably more interesting is the ability to meetup with someone in Home, and then play a Playstation game with them over the Internet. Whilst the playing over the Internet idea is far from new, it is a unique way to approach it. It adds a social dimension to game play (along with the included voice chat) which could possibly make Internet gameplay far more addictive.
Sony are also taking user generated content seriously; as a user of Home I will be given, for free, an apartment, which I can then hang my own pictures up in and customise to my heart’s content, presumably buying various virtual items from Sony to add to my dream virtual home.
UGC is absolutely crucial for such games; it creates a feeling of ownership over the game for every individual user, making it far more sticky.
Commerce is not being overlooked. Sony state in their FAQs that:
Home prioritises community and entertainment over ecommerce. That said, we believe that there will be ample opportunities for businesses and individuals alike to generate significant revenues from the Home platform.
This is similar to the approach taken by Second Life and other MMO games, and it makes a lot of sense. Sony, and others who set up business in Home, will be able to make vast sums of money selling things which do not really exist and which cost little or no money to develop. In the modern world of games consoles being sold at a vast loss, manufacturers are looking at every possible avenue to create additional revenue streams.
Second Life has been hyped enormously, with pop concerts and press conferences from real bands and companies happening exclusively within Second Life. Despite this, I have always held Second Life in the greatest disdain; I spent about 15 minutes playing it some time ago and was struck by the pointlessness of it all. Whilst there are many, many people who are fans of such games, I have rightly or wrongly assumed that they are either people without a social life, who are fascinated in the technology or who are only able to create meaningful friendships through such a program.
I do not, however, treat Playstation Home with the same disdain. It seems that Home has a purpose, namely gaming, which should give the whole virtual world meaning. If I were able to afford a Playstation 3, I think I might well enjoy a quick stroll around Home to find someone to play against, and then actually playing the game with them. In Second Life all that is possible is the stroll, and I think that if virtual worlds are to live up to the hype, they have to offer more than a stroll.
[Engadget was a useful source]
Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz. He is the co-founder of the Oratos Media technology blog network, and his personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!
With dSLRs plummeting in price, upmarket bridge cameras are having to up the feature set to keep punters interested, and Sony are hoping that their replacements to last year’s DSC-H2 and DSC-H5 cameras have got what it takes.
Sony’s new DSC-H7 and DSC-H9 cameras come with an immense 15x optical Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar zoom, which translates into a whopping 31-465mm range (35mm equiv) – perfect for wannabe paparazzi and lurking stalkers.
(The one advantage that the small sensors of digital compacts have over their dSLR rivals is that they can facilitate huge zooms that won’t end up challenging a Northern mill chimney in size.)
The two 8.1-megapixel cameras are more or less identical, except the higher priced DSC-H9 comes with a larger LCD monitor (3″ screen with 230k colours compared to the DSC-H7’s 2.5″/115k screen) and a natty fold out screen. We like them.
Both cameras sport face detection technology, HDTV output, red-eye reduction and an action-freezing shutter speed up to 1/4000 of a second, backed by a slew of auto, manual and scene modes.
The same Bionz processing engine that lurks inside the excellent Alpha dSLR camera is onboard, as well as Super Steady Shot optical image stabilisation and a high sensitivity ISO 3200 rating for low light shots.
Sony has also included their NightShot technology, which is a whole load of fun if you’re snapping away in a coal mine, but we reckon Sony’s design team must have been chewing on the crazy dust when they decided to leave out any movie modes.
There’s no RAW image capture either, an omission that will surely push keen photographers further in the direction of cut price dSLRs like Nikon’s fine D40
They’re still both fine looking cameras, mind, and priced at around $400 (DSC-H7) and $480 (DSC-H9), we reckon they should do well when they beam down from Planet Sony sometime in April.
Sony has just let it be know that it will be redesigning the internals for the EuropeanPS3, removing the Emotion Engine, which gives compatibility with PS2 games.
The Emotion Engine will instead be handled in what they call, “a new combination of hardware and software emulation which will enable PS3 to be compatible with a broad range of original PlayStation (PS) titles and a limited range of PlayStation2 (PS2) titles.”
Much fuss was made by Sony of the Emotion Engine when they were building up to the initial release of the first PlayStation. CNN even went as far as asking if the PS2 will replace the PC, with claims like, it was “two times faster than a 733-MHz Pentium III and 15 times faster than a 400-MHz Celeron at handling tasks like full-motion video.”
Now we know that Sony are keen to make the maximum amount of money reduce the amount of money that they are losing from selling PS3s. According to iSupply’s estimate on the Bill Of Material of the PS3, they’ll save $27 on this.
Many UK gamers were angered when they felt that they were paying over the odds for the UK PS3 when the price of £425 was made official. This news will do nothing to make them feel better.
The real danger is that if people think they’re going to get less of a machine that their-cousins in the US and Japan have, that may well be the last straw in deciding which ‘Next-Gen’ console they’ll buy – even if they never end up playing any of their old PS2 games.
Sony is on a knife-edge with this one. We’ve already postulated that the PS3 might not be bought in the way that was once thought, before the Wii caught peoples imaginations.
What is strange is that in an interview at the start of February, SCE UK managing director, Ray Maguire, said that the machines were being built at that point, but omitted to mention that they would be fundamentally different.
Full release follows …
23/02/2007 10:00
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Announces Hardware Specification of PLAYSTATION®3 for Europe
London, 23 February 2007 – Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) today announced that PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) to be launched in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Australasia on 23rd March 2007 would utilise a new hardware specification.
The European PS3 will feature the Cell Broadband Engine™, 60 GB hard disc drive, Blu-ray Disc player, built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, SIXAXIS™ wireless controller. It also embodies a new combination of hardware and software emulation which will enable PS3 to be compatible with a broad range of original PlayStation® (PS) titles and a limited range of PlayStation®2 (PS2) titles.
“PS3 is first and foremost a system that excels in playing games specifically designed to exploit the power and potential of the PS3 system,” said David Reeves, President of SCEE. “Games designed for PS3 offer incredible graphics quality, stunning gameplay and massively improved audio and video fidelity that is simply not achievable with PS and PS2 games. Rather than concentrate on PS2 backwards compatibility, in the future, company resources will be increasingly focused on developing new games and entertainment features exclusively for PS3, truly taking advantage of this exciting technology.”
Some additional PS2 titles will become compatible on the PS3 system through regular downloadable firmware updates, which will be made available through the PLAYSTATION®Network, from http://www.playstation.com or via PS3 game discs, with the first update planned for the launch date of the 23rd March 2007.
Users will be able to check whether their titles are compatible with PS3 at http://faq.eu.playstation.com/bc. This site will be available on 23rd March to meet launch day.
1. A device compatible with Linear PCM 7.1 Ch is required to output 7.1 ch audio, supported by Dolby TrueHD or a similar format, from the HDMI OUT connector.
2. This system does not support output from the DTS-HD 7.1 Ch. DTS-HD 7.1 Ch audio is output from a 5.1 or lower channel.
3. Usability of all storage media types is not guaranteed.
4. Certain PlayStation 2 format software titles may not perform properly on this system. Visit faq.eu.playstation.com/bc for the latest information regarding compatible titles
Brief notes from the launch of the W880.
First in a new line for them – a slim Walkman phone – 9.4mm thin/thick – slimmer than a CD case.
Comes complete with 1Gb memory stick (M2) which can hold 900 full length tracks, with the equivalent to 90 cds. It features the latest version on Walkman player 2.0 (the 850 has it already). They’ve tried to simplify the navigation, which is especially important with 900 tracks and 18 hours of music playback.
Software features: TrackID disc2phone and playnow; 2mpx camera; 3G with video calling too.
It’s already in production – Shipping in February 2007 (* We suspect a dig at Apple).
There’s a W88c with it just for China as there’s no 3G China
It was designed in the Tokyo design studio with the software being done in Sweden.
