From our friends at Gamespot.CEO Sir Howard Stringer says console will soon have online connectivity to range of products, including mobile phones; PSN being primed to take on Xbox Live, iTunes.
By Tor Thorsen, GameSpot
Posted Dec 12, 2007 1:24 am EET
At the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo, Sony first took the wraps off Remote Play, a function that would allow PlayStation 3 owners to wirelessly stream music, videos, and games from their consoles onto a PlayStation Portable. A local version of the functionality was introduced in March as part of the PS3's v1.6 firmware update and was further enhanced to allow access via the Internet as part of November 1.8 firmware update.
Today, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer told an audience in Tokyo that Remote Play is only the beginning of the PS3's external connectivity. The Bloomberg news service reports that the Welsh executive--the first Western-born CEO in Sony's history--said his company plans to eventually link up the PS3 to mobile phones and a range of other unspecified electronics. The specific mention of phones resurrected longstanding rumors that Sony is readying a PlayStation-branded phone much like its Bravia TV-branded Sony Ericsson mobile.
The drive for mobile phone-to-PS3 connectivity will be part of Sony's next three-year business plan, which starts on April 1, 2008. That date also marks the start of Sony's next fiscal year, which Stringer predicts will see a massive expansion of the PS3's online service, the PlayStation Network.
"PlayStation Network next year puts us in the direct line of fire with Apple and Microsoft," Stringer told the Reuters news service, obliquely referencing iTunes and Xbox Live. He also dropped hints, which reinforced previous Sony statements, that the year would see many assets in the company's massive content portfolio appear on PSN. "On Friday, we had a dinner where the heads of Sony Electronics, [Sony] Pictures, Sony BMG, and Sony PlayStation were all at the same dinner table intermingled and actually communicating," he said.
Wow....so this is retarded....
The PS3 still has the smallest game library of the three next generation systems, yet just has all this.......stuff.....and they want to add more!
It looks like Sony was serious when they said the PS3 wasn't a video game console, it was a Entertainment Hub which just so happened to play video games......or at least that's what their trying to make it into.
So Sony has all these big plans coming up for 2008...and I still don't see a good roster of highly anticipated games and/or exclusives (just MSG4..but I've never been a big MSG player personally).
And the way they're gimping the newer versions of the PS3 (the european 40gb and american 60gb only have software emulation for PS2 games, while the American 40 has NO Backward compatibility at all) in order to try to penetrate to a lower price bracket, plus the lack of compelling game lineup.....This will be another hard year for the Sony Playstion department I think....