Sony Announce the PS3 Slim at Gamescom

18th August 2009 • 0 Comments

Well the rumours were true, moments ago Sony just announced that the PS3 Slim will replace the current PS3 on the 1st of September and have its price cut down to €299. The most striking difference on the outside is how small it is and secondly the change in the logo, they have got rid of the Spiderman font and replaced it with a PS2 style logo. 

It seems most of the changes are making everything smaller and lighter, the amount of power it consumes has also been reduced by two thirds, as the original PS3 was a beast for power, this is a good thing for those environmentalists. The amount of hard drive space you get has also been upped to 120GB from the 80GB model, so in theory you'll be getting a better console with the PS3 Slim. It would seem that the Blu ray drive has also been given a boost from 1.5 times to now reading at 2 times, which should hopefully make games load faster. 

In terms of new features it will come with the 3.00 firmware update, where some aspects of the interface have been improved. The info bar in the top right of the screen has been replaced with some of your PSN information, such as number of friends online, messages and your avatar. A What's New section has been added which displays a bunch of links to Playstation Store items or upcoming games, it will also have an icon for the last game you've been playing. Animated themes can now be used and these can change through the day, at last some new avatar images will also be added however some of them you may have to pay for.

The Playstation Store icon has also been moved into the Game and Video tabs to allow quick access to each part of the store which Sony also announced that the Video Store will finally be coming to Europe in November. On top of this Europeans will finally be able to buy Playstation Cards in stores, so no more need for a credit card on the Playstation Store, it took them long enough. For us Brits it seems that support for BBC iPlayer will be coming soon as well, it will be nice to have a native app rather than relying on a web browser. 

Weirdly it seems that the option to install another OS is being removed in 3.00, a strange decision but the majority of PS3 owners won't notice/care. 

There were a lot of announcements for the PS3 but let us not forget the PSP Go is out soon as well and Sony weren't short of announcements on this respect as well. A Digital Reader was announced which allows PSP users to read comics on their PSP's, whilst a good idea personally I didn't find MGS: Digital Graphic Novel to be that compelling on a PSP so I'm doubtful about how successful that will be.

Sony's version of the app store was also unveiled and given the odd name of PSP mini's. These are small bite sized games designed for portable play, however they are limited to under 100MB. A price was not mentioned but expect them to be fairly cheap.

A good move from Sony to have more quick and easy games on the PSP but I would have expected them to do more to rival Apple's App store. Titles that will be at the PSP Go launch include the brilliant Pac Man Championship edition and Fieldrunners. To add to the excitement it was announced that anyone buying a PSP Go at launch would get a free copy of Gran Turismo providing they register by the 10th of October, which is a pretty good deal.

Other things on show was some new spaces for Playstation Home and new colours for the PSP 3000 (nice to see they're still supporting it). As predicted Heavy Rain was also shown off.

All in all a pretty strong showing from Sony, the price cut was well needed and seems even better now that Microsoft have upped the price in the UK of their Arcade. Personally I don't like the design of the new PS3 slim as I think it's a bit ugly, but this redesign has allowed for a cheaper box and also a smaller console which will please some people as the original PS3 was a bit huge. It was disappointing to not see any GT5 but that will probably appear at TGS.

It would have been nice to see Sony do more with the PSP Mini idea but that may develop as time goes along, they still need to get over the problem of the price though, especially as the PS3 Slim is now only €50 more. A good showing from Sony overall and it seems the future may be bright for a change.