News written by Matti Robinson (March, 2006)

After more or less steady rise from late 1994 when Sony PlayStation was brought to public, Sony stalls the production for good. The eleven years of production of this flagbearer has proven its immense success among gamers and game developers alike. "Sony PlayStation has proved an enormous success, so enormous in fact, that we consider this sentence an understatement."

The long-running growth of original PlayStation units sold crossed a milestone of 100 million units was announced by Sony in September 2005. Now that the release point of PS3 has been clarified, it seems like a good moment for Sony to pull of one of its attractions off the market.

Even though the production is shut down, Sony says it doesn't necessarily mean that the hardware and software are sold out or not available.

Source:
ComputerAndVideoGames.com

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Ken Kutagari and Sony said what the whole world was waiting to hear. Sony's next-generation console will have a worldwide release date in November. As reported in ComputerAndVideoGames.com earlier, "Instead of rushing it, we want to make sure we execute a solid launch... We wanted to make the Thanksgiving sales," said the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Ken Kutagari.

Sony states that the monthly production capacity of PS3 is 1 millions units and that the console is hoped to go mushrooming simultaneously in Asia, United States and Europe. According to Sony, the fast-paced release around the world will feature a "strong and attractive" liveup of games.

David Reeves, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe touted the importance of European market. And he probably has all the reasons, as far as analysts estimated, the European launch would have been scheduled to first quarter of 2007.

The technical specs didn't get much airtime, but Sony announced that the Blu-ray drive included in PS3 will handle both standard definition and high definition TV sets. They also added that consumers will be able to connect their PS3 to a network using a high-speed connection through Gigabit Ethenet and enjoy a variety of services.

Sony will announce new information about its next-generation console PlayStation 3. These details may include pricing information, launch dates and software line-ups of the upcoming console. The announcement will be presented in Tokyo tomorrow March 15th at a Sony conference.

The conference that has been rumored to include PS3 revelations for the past week, will open its doors 6am GMT and is open to media and Sony's publishing partners. The president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Ken Kutaragi is set to address the conference. This is possibly the last chance for the company to make announcements regarding PS3 details before their year-end on March 31st.

Obviously the discussion about PS3 release problems makes it a bit harder to believe that the exact launch dates could be unveiled tomorrow, but after Sony claimed to be on schedule on the release of the console, they probably can't wait all the way to E3. The fact that the screenshots from a PS3 version of RPG Untold Legends were accidently released days before the scheduled Wednesday morning indicates that the Tokyo conference will have some kind of software presentation planned.

The analysts have commonly estimated a launch in late summer of early autumn in Japan, near Christmas in United States and first quarter of 2007 in Europe. Tomorrow we'll see what is the opinion of Sony.

Microsoft announced its formerly mysterious handheld device called Origami. The publishing of this product happened on the first day of CeBIT as it was suspected by considering the hint at origamiproject.com. Microsoft is hyping their "Ultra-Mobile PC" with gaming possibilities, while the Microsoft's official UMPC site is focusing on photos, music and videos.

As we suspected earlier, the upcoming UMPC is not a handheld version of Xbox or most likely not even a competitor to PSP or Nintendo DS. For people interested in Origami's gaming capabilities it will surely be a disappointment. All that Microsoft has so far offered in means of gaming with this UMPC, is a picture of a typical puzzle game. The slogan - "Enjoy PC and Internet games in new ways with touch, stylus, or hardware controls." - does not yet seem too fancy, however considering the future price of the UMPC, it should have enough power to run at least some of the less demanding PC games.

The UMPC will be manufactured by three Microsoft partners, Asus, Founder and Samsung. The device is featured with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functions and will have a hard drive capacity between 30GB and 60GB. It weighs around two pounds and has a 7 inch WGA touch screen. Estimations on the price vary between $800 and $1200.