In late February Sony announced they were going to release the BDP-S300 Blu-ray player this summer at the low price of $599, which at the time was already around $400 less than a similar Blu-ray player from Sony. Now as Sony is gearing up to launch the player this week they’ve made a surprise announcement of a $100 price cut, bring the price for the BDP-S300 down to $499.

Sony says that the price cut is due to falling costs and increasing demand, although the rival HD-DVD players from Toshiba are selling at as little as $300. So far it seems that neither the Blu-ray or HD-DVD format has really caught on yet with consumers or studios, both waiting for one format or the other to take the lead.

Even though the …

Sony has now released a new version of its firmware for the Playstation Portable (ver. 3.50) that enables the Remote Play capabilities through a wireless internet connection from your PS3 sitting in the next room, the next town or the next country.

The Playstation 3 firmware was updated recently as well in order to support this feature and the PSP upgrade closes the loop to allow you to control your PS3 using your PSP. The Remote Play feature to me sounds a little better than it is. Remote Play almost implies that you can actually “play” your PS3 games on your Playstation Portable, when in fact you can’t. You can however play videos, music and view photos that are stored on your PS3 through your PSP, but that’s it, at least for now.

You can upgrade your PSP to the …

Larger drives for more non-gaming media is the trend as Sony has confirmed talk that they did indeed have an 80GB Playstation 3 model in the works and its heading to Korea on the 16th of June. Along with the bigger drive this version will also have the cost-saving emulation software that Europe got in their version of the PS3 instead of the original Emotion Engine.

The PS3 launched in the US and Japan back in November with a 20GB and 60GB model, although the company decided to drop the 20GB version in some markets including North America in April and only offer the larger capacity 60GB version which was getting better sales.

According to Sony, they made the decision to launch the 80GB version in Korea due to an already-heavy use of online multimedia by consumers combined …

Sony isn’t sitting on its haunches watching potential PlayStation 3 customers try to find a Nintendo Wii or open their wallets for a Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite. At a media event held in San Diego yesterday the company drummed up some excitement for its upcoming game lineup for the rest of 2007 and the start of ‘08 and showed that there’s plenty of excitement to come for PSP and PS3 owners.

The game that’s attracted some of the biggest buzz is “LittleBigPlanet”, a community based game that lets up to four players solve puzzles by interacting with objects. The game is high on creativity, boasts impressive graphics thanks to the PS3’s Cell processor technology, has a very catchy soundtrack and is stuffed with an immense amount of cuteness that should appeal to a broad audience (and maybe even a jaded “Quake” gamer or two.) …

Today Sony unveiled a new VAIO FZ series laptop which packs a Blu-Ray disc player along with a 15.4 inch widescreen display. This combination results in a lightweight multimedia notebook that can play movies in 1080 HD resolution as well as record and play back personal content on the Blu-Ray media.

Aside from the hi-def player, this new premium model of the VAIO FZ comes with a Centrino Duo processor, a built-in 802.11n wireless LAN and Windows Vista Home Premium. The laptop also has a built-in camera and microphone and support for an ExpressCard to help with those large file transfers.

The VAIO FZ premium model will retail for around $2000 while the FZ standard (without the Blu-ray player) will go for about $1400. You can find the VAIO FZ series at the Sony site and should be showing up at …

Well that didn’t take long. Just last week Sony announced their PlayStation Eye for the PS3 and now they’ve told European PSP owners to expect their own ocular add-on in just over two weeks.

The Go!Cam will street on May 16 and cost about 35 pounds (US $70). It can take up to two-and-a-half hours worth of video/audio (it’s got a built-in mic) or about 40,000 photos with a 4 Gig Memory Stick PRO Duo. Best of all, thanks to the PSP’s wireless abilities you can transmit those files without the need for cords and clutter. The tiny chrome camera has a 180 degree vertical range but no horizontal movement. The Go!Cam will come bundled with Go!Edit software which allows you to edit and store your video and audio files.

So far Sony has only issued price info and a release date for its European customer …

Sony will be releasing the PlayStation Eye this coming summer so all those PS3 owners will be able to see each other playing “Warhawk” when it streets later this year.

Based on its specs the Playstation Eye sounds impressive: it will have two zoom features (one for close-ups and one for seeing full body images), low-light level enhancement, noise reduction technology for the four-direction microphone and up to 120 frames per second frame rate (640 x 480 at 60 frames/sec and 320 x 240 at 120 frames/sec.) Sony also has a type of software called EyeCreate that allows gamers to edit and save photos, video and audio files including time lapse and slow motion techniques (so you can make your own music video, of course.)

It definitely sounds like Sony is going head-to-head with Microsoft’s social gaming model now, and in the company’s spin they stress that …

Sony has unveiled a lineup of 3 new high-def Handycam camcorders led by the HDR-CX7 which is currently the smallest and lightest AVCHD camcorder available. Weighing only 15 ounces with the battery, the HDR-CX7 can record up to 3 hours of full HD 1080 video onto an 8GB Memory Stick.

The camcorder has a 2.7 inch LCD screen which makes it easy to navigate menus and browse recorded content on the “film roll”. Recording takes advantage of a 3 megapixel sensor for HD video and the camera will take 6 megapixel still images. Both pictures and recording use Sony’s SteadyShot feature to help with the unavoidable shaky video or blurry pictures when trying to get footage on the go. The sound won’t suffer with this, either. The HDR-CX7 records in Dolby 5.1 surround sound which gets compressed and saved in the MPEG-4 file format with the …

Things just weren’t fair when Sony announced a 20% price cut on the PSP in the US but nowhere else. To even things up a bit Sony today has announced that Europe too will now see in drop in the price by £50 bringing the retail list down to £129.99. Should we expect Japan to be next?

In addition to the cut in price five new Platinum game titles are launching at the same time with a low price of £14.99 each. Ridge Racer 2, Tekken, Killzone, Loco Roco, and Moto GP round off the new titles that will be available from Sony for the PSP.

All this doesn’t happen until May 4 and still keeps the price higher than the Nintendo DS which is already consistently outperforming the PSP in sales.

With lagging sales and the decision to stop making the smaller 20 GB version of the PlayStation 3, Sony is now facing the unenviable position of playing catch-up in the race to be the number one selling next gen gaming machine.

Microsoft is also playing hardball with Sony by announcing the Xbox 360 Elite which gives users a 120 GB hard drive to play around with, besting the largest PS3 drive by a factor of two. Now two strong indicators have surfaced that show Sony is preparing to also up the size of its PS3 hard drive.

The reports stem from a March 2007 Sony request to the FCC to change the hard drive capacity on its PS3 gaming system from 60 GB to 80 GB. The report, practically a smoking gun, was given further strength when a Sony executive commented …

This past January we reported about Sony’s ultra-thin OLED (orangic light emitting diode) televisions that were on display at the CES. These beauties produce a far greater range of colors and contrast ratio (try 1,000,000:1) making them absolutely amazing to look at – and they range in thickness from just 3mm to 9mm.

At the CES Sony wasn’t saying one word about cost or when the public would be able to purchase these in stores, leading to speculation that the OLED technology would remain out-of-reach and in the prototype stage until Sony could crack a way to mass manufacturer them.

Now it appears that Sony has solved that problem because the Japanese electronics titan has announced that it will begin selling OLED TVs before the end of 2007. But here’s the rub: Sony hasn’t revealed what size their first OLED units will be or …

Coming out later this month in the land of the rising sun are Sony’s new E Series Walkman DAPs and if you don’t pay attention, you might mistake one for a USB drive.

These trim beauties will come in three memory sizes (1 GB, 2 GB and 4 GB) and in five metallic colors (black, gold, pink, blue and purple.) Weighing in at just 29 grams they can play MP3, AAC, WMA and ATRAC files using Sony’s Clear Audio technology and, of course, dock right into any USB port.

Sony has confirmed rumors and officially announced that it will no longer be offering the 20GB version of the Playstation 3 to consumers in North America. The 20GB PS3 has similar functionality as the 60GB model aside from a few features including WiFi capabilities.

Apparently a very significant number of people have been willing to shell out the extra cash for the more expensive model of the PS3, and according to Sony, retailers have been requesting the 60GB version with WiFi over the 20GB console at a ratio of 10 to 1. This fact has prompted Sony Computer Entertainment America to just discontinue offering the model with the smaller drive all together and focus their production on the more expensive 60GB version.

“At launch, we offered two separate models of PLAYSTATION 3 to meet the diverse needs and interests of our PlayStation …

Sony has officially announced a price drop in the US for its PlayStation Portable by $30 bringing the purchase price down to $170, as well as a 20% drop on the PSP Entertainment pack which now sells for $200. This price drop coincides with the second anniversary of the handheld game console.

Could this be because the game is getting old and just not selling, or maybe in anticipation of the PSP2? Maybe they just need to boost some sales to make up for the $443 million operating loss Sony recently reported, or possibly they are trying to be more competitive with the Nintendo Gameboy and DS?

No matter what the reason it’s good for those already considering the PSP as Sony just saved you some bucks, and as a little tip from The Brick, check out TigerDirect. They …

Two months after releasing its first docking station for Apple’s iPod, Sony is back to show off a new adapter that connects your ‘pod to Bravia home theaters. The Digital Media Port iPod Dock, a.k.a. TDM-IP1, acts as the middleman between the two technology titans, a move that Sony had been putting off for some time.

The sleek black appearance weighs about 220 grams and is 90 x 78 x 65 mm, so it doesn’t take up too much space somewhere close to your TV. The TDM-IP1 is compatible with the more recent iPods (like the first and second generation nanos and the fourth and fifth gen iPods/iPod minis), but does anyone still have an older model kicking around anyway?

Sony has priced the adapter at a penny under $100 which doesn’t make it the cheapest iPod adapter out there, but …