Today the Sony Corp. has announced that their new
Sony PSX console will begin selling in Japan by the year-end. The PSX will
feature a normal PlayStation 2 game player but besides that it will also have a
satellite TV tuner, a DVD recorder and a hard disk drive recorder. Our
thanks goes to GristyMcFisty who spotted this news over at Yahoo! News:
A version with a 160-gigabyte HDD will sell for 79,800
yen (US$ 719) and be able to record up to 204 hours of television, the
company said. It will also sell a 250-gigabyte version for 99,800
yen.
Sony plans to market the PSX as a consumer electronics
product and aims to pitch the box as a do-everything entertainment console
for games, music and movies.
The company's games division has developed
cutting-edge semiconductors for the PS2 and the original PlayStation, but
it is the upcoming PlayStation machine that has people buzzing about the
integration of electronics and games.
Sony plans to invest 500 billion yen over the next
three years in semiconductors, including research and development for a
high-powered microprocessor codenamed "cell" that is being developed with
Toshiba Corp and IBM.
The chip is expected to power Sony's next-generation
game console, but the company aims to make "cell" the global standard for
consumer electronics in the high-speed Internet
era.
