Hasta La Gadget!

The only hardware shown on-stage during Sony’s PlayStation 4 event was the retooled DualShock controller, the DualShock 4. No box. No PS4 Eye. No new version of Move. As for the console itself, its absence makes some sense in light of today’s news from SCEA prez Jack Tretton that the console’s internals are “still in development in terms of final specs and design.” So, how final is the only piece of hardware Sony was willing to trot out? “It’s near final. It’s just gonna be small tweaks being done,” Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida told us in an interview this morning.

Sadly, he also admitted we won’t be able to touch any of it anytime soon. “By E3, I think” was the best he could offer. He blamed Sony’s hardware folks for not allowing access, despite him pleading with PR to give hands-on time. “I was just asking our PR team can we just let you touch this stuff. Our hardware guys don’t want you to find out some detail that …” he said, trailing off. “Some dirty secret?” we asked. “Of course,” he responded with a smile.

Moving on to Vita and the Remote Play functionality on PS4 (which allows you to play any PS4 game on your Vita, via streaming), Yoshida said that — unlike with the PlayStation 3’s Remote Play functionality — Sony’s asking devs to try their game via Remote Play on Vita before submitting final code for publishing. He also said that, using Remote Play, developers could implement Vita-specific controls. “Some PS Vita games make use of the edge of the screen to add contextual buttons — that works really well, I think, and it’s easy to see. So that kind of thing I’d like to see developers do on PS Vita over Remote Play,” Yoshida explained.

He also apologized for not showing the final box, getting out ahead of the inevitable question from the room full of journalists. But hey, we sympathize — Sony’s gotta save something for E3, right? PlayStation Plus on PlayStation 4 may also be on that list; when we asked Yoshida about its presence on the next Sony game console, he coyly answered, “I know the answer, but we’re not talking about it. I’m a subscriber, so I’d like to see it.” Us too!

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Software, HD, Sony

Comments

Despite the PlayStation Vita getting a recent price cut in its home country of Japan, Sony says it isn’t getting a similar price adjustment in North America. The Vita recently dropped from 30,000 yen (3G) and 25,000 yen (WiFi-only) to 19,980 yen, but Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida tells Joystiq that that same price drop won’t happen in the US. He cited exchange rates as the primary reason — Japanese Yen has dropped in value to (currently) 0.93 cents to every US dollar, meaning Sony actually loses money in exchange on products sold outside of its home territory.

The Vita launched in February 2012 and has suffered from poor sales throughout the past year — Sony’s hoping to revitalize that a bit with PlayStation 4 connectivity. Via Remote Play, all PlayStation 4 games are streamable on Vita. Whether that’ll be a feature that consumers use is another question altogether; Remote Play exists on PlayStation 3 already, and it’s not what we’d call a great experience.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, HD, Sony

Comments

Source: Joystiq

What you see above is the next PlayStation’s controller, at least in some version of prototype, seemingly connected to a development unit for the next PlayStation (codenamed “Orbis“). The image popped up on Destructoid a few hours ago — we’ve spoken with development sources who confirmed it to be a recent version of the next PlayStation’s controller and a beta unit of the dev kit, though it’s not clear how much the pictured controller will match up with the final product (and the console will assuredly look quite different from the dev unit). Sony’s expected to show the PlayStation 3’s successor at a New York City event next Wednesday, February 20th, wherein a new version of the company’s classic DualShock controller is expected to be unveiled.

Corroborating reports, the pictured controller features a rectangular touchpad in between the standard d-pad and four-button setup, though it’s missing the rumored Share button. It’s also unclear if the blue light seen atop the controller serves a function — a stand-in for Move support, perhaps? — and our sources were unable to clarify. What looks like a speaker grill can be spotted just above a newly lowered PlayStation button, which seems to indicate some form of Wiimote-esque sound functionality built into the controller.

Update: A Sony rep tells us, “We can’t comment on rumors or speculation.”

[Photo credit: Destructoid]

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Peripherals, HD, Sony

Comments

Source: Destructoid

The comparison is obvious: BlackBerry‘s already-infamous “Can’t Do” commercial in this year’s Super Bowl vs. Apple’s legendary “1984” spot in the 1984 game. Let’s do the comparison anyway, and consider some other tech advertising over 35 years of Super Bowls.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Blackberry

Comments

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

In the golden era of the PDA, many debated whether future consumers would adopt a one-device or two-device approach. The two-devicers argued that the connectivity for phone calls would come from a simple, bare-bones cellphone while all the fancy data management would occur on a Bluetooth-tethered, PDA-like device unbound from cellular contracts. The Handspring Treo was for many the first converged-device handset that accomplished key tasks well enough to make a convincing case for handset integration, and the smartphone revolution ensued.

The first iPhone featured a large screen for its time but not a much larger footprint than its contemporary competitors such as the BlackBerry or Treo. Competitors asked if a 3.5-inch handheld palette was good for consuming web content, wasn’t a 4.3-inch display — like that on the HTC EVO 4G better? Screen sizes and attendant resolution continued to grow with the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note, 5.5-inch Galaxy Note II and culminating in the 6.1-inch Huawei Ascend Mate that debuted at CES. Samsung and Huawei are joined by LG, Sony and HTC in offering or announcing a 5-inch or larger Android phone. The latter joined the pocket-stuffing ranks with the 5-inch Droid DNA on Verizon, available in China as the HTC Butterfly.

Filed under: Handhelds

Comments