PS3 - More smoke and Mirrors

I am not a fan of misleading marketing, and this is why Sony has struck a particularly bad chord with me. They don't have a particularly good track record when it comes to treating the consumers well, as we have seen with the rootkit fiasco (when you buy some Sony Music CDs it installed harmful spyware that allowed other spyware to piggyback and be completely hidden and unremovable from your system).

During E3 2005, along with vastly overstating the power of the PS3 and understating the power of the X360 by showing images that were clearly not possible in real time on the PS3 (despite the fact that the media swallowed it hook-line-and sinker), they also went so far as to inflate the feature set of the PS3.

In 2005, the PS3 would support 7 controllers. It would have 3 Gigabit ethernet ports and act as a gigabit router. It would have 2 HDMI jacks and be capable of outputting dual-screen. It would have 6 USB jacks. They blasted MS for not having HDMI and thus, not being able to output a digital 1080P signal. The media quickly ripped Microsoft apart and praised Sony.

In forums, I said that it was going to all get cut. I listed all the features that would be removed. Every single one was dead on, except one, I also said that there might be a clockspeed reduction of the GPU. Oh well... sue me. (But I still wouldn't be surprised if this one came to pass)



























Take a close look there. There are 3 PS3's. 1 from 2005, and then the two models announced, the $500 and the $600 one.

There is only one ethernet jack.
There are ZERO usb jacks on the back (and on the front it was reduced to 2 from 4)
The $500 PS3 has ZERO HDMI jacks and the $600 PS3 has 1.

Also notice that the PS3 just got fatter. The 2005 model was larger than the X360, the new fatty PS3 will be even larger.

And I'm going to say right now, that it still hasn't gotten big enough. In another slander tactic, Sony stated that, unlike microsoft, "they build consoles right", and they will be including the power supply in the case. It's funny because I believe the president of the company forgot that their new PSTwo's don't have built in power supplies.

Also funny that most Japanese cited that the reason the Xbox isn't appealing is because it is too big. The X360 is smaller than the Xbox, and the PS3 will be BIGGER than the Xbox. I wonder what half-assed excuse the Japanese will use now to justify their nationalistic pride in their home built electronics.

Of course, those cases aren't actually working PS3's. At E3, the PS3's used were all dev-kits which were in the form of a large server rack style case (easily 2x larger than the case shown). With the amount of heat generated by the huge CPU and GPU and now toss in an Internal HDD (the X360 has the HDD clipped to the top of the box), and worse yet, internal powersupply, that case will either need to get bigger still, or it will sound like a jet engine taking off as the fans desperately try to keep it from melting.

Yes, I'm not happy with Sony and the PS3 if you couldn't tell by now. And sadly, people are still so influenced by branding rather than by quality and features, that Sony will likely still obliterate Microsoft in sales as soon as they ramp up production.

They still have time to impress me, maybe their online service will rock, maybe their content delivery system will usher in a new age of entertainment. But, I won't hold my breath, and I won't buy it until they prove that they can do more than just bait and switch.