With the upcoming 2.0 player profile Sony finally gets to play its trump card: the PlayStation 3, which has clearly emerged as one of the best Blu-ray players on the market—and is likely to remain so for some time.

Blu-ray 2.0 is the profile of the future, requiring the two secondary decoders, 1GB of local storage for updates and content, and an Internet connection.

Most existing blu-ray players won’t be able to meet this specification with a simple firmware update.  This gives the PS3 a good lead for this spec, being the only player that supports it.

The 2.0 profile brings picture-in-picture and online functionality to Blu-ray discs; these movies will have “BD-Live” stickers on the case so you know certain features will require 2.0-compliant players

The PS3 continues to domainate the Xbox 360 in sales across Europe.  This has been the case since October 2007 and have sold a total of 5 million units.

However this number is still not enough to be the top selling console, wich is comfortabley held by the lower prices Wii

Sony has released a special edition Metal Gear Solid 4  PS3 console bundle which  will be available exclusively from Konami.com.  Other than the inclusion of a limited edition version of MGS4 the main differentiating factor will be the Gun Metal Gray coloured console.

An Aussie tech website has apparently been talking to a Sony insider, who revealed that a new version of the Playstation could be here in under 18 months.  However this next playstation would still be based on the same chipset in the Playstation 3 but would have a different “drive bay and attachment area” and additional media center like software.  So it wouldn’t be a real next generation Playstation 4 but just a refresh of the PS3.

Sony denided the rumours as expected, but an updated PS3 down the track is not out of the question

Toshiba Corporation announced today the beginning of sample shipping of the SpursEngine™ SE1000 (SpursEngine). It is a high-performance stream processor integrating 4 Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores derived from the “Cell Broadband Engine™” as used in the Playstation 3.  Samples started shipping from today, and Toshiba is expecting sales of 6 million units within the first three years of its release.

SpursEngine is a co-processor that integrates a hardware codec for Full HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams with four SPEs derived from Cell/B.E.  These advanced processing elements offer high performance media streaming capabilities, with a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while achieving low power consumption range of 10W to 20W.

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Having a streak of tech geekiness can be a horrible curse at times. Not a moment has passed since the release of the playstation 3 and already the questions are popping up about release dates for the ps4.

The earliest estimated release date of the Playstation 4 is 2010, as said by Paul Holman (Sony’s VP of Technology). The stated reason for this is “Sony will introduce a series of firmware upgrades that will give the PS3 more media centre capability while allowing for the introduction of third party applications and hardware ’such as interactive controllers’ similar to the Nintendo Wii”

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