Working in conjunction with the pre-existing Sony Eyetoy, the PlayStation Move will bring precision motion controls to the PS3. Gamers will immediately be reminded of Nintendo’s “Wiimote” when they use Move’s wand controller. Featuring a motion-sensing, bulb-headed control for one hand and an analog stick and control buttons for the other, Sony’s Move is conspicuously similar to Nintendo’s design.

Unlike Nintendo, however, Move will have the benefit of an extremely powerful home console backing it. The Wii, though extremely popular, was notoriously weak from a hardware standpoint. Sony is claiming this is their next step in their plan to be the end-all, be-all entertainment device. The Move is expected to sell for $99 or less. A bundle including the required Playstation 3 system will also be available, retailing at $399.

Gamers will be awash in motion controls this holiday season. Microsoft’s Kinect will also be competing against Sony’s latest peripheral.

The move will launch with ten or more titles from companies such as Konami, Sony, and Capcom. The console will support up to four players at once, making it an ideal system for party gaming. Players can expect to see it on the market in America on September 19th.

It remains to be seen what interest level gamers will have in the Move, but expect a major rollout feature a multi-media advertising blitz shortly.

On March 01, Sony announced that PS3 consoles, except the PS3 Slim, were  not able to connect with the Playstation Network because due to a bug in the consules clock. What’s worse is that simply turning on the consoles can cause “errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not restoring some data.” As such, Sony advised staying away from the PS3 until they can fix the problem, hopefully within 24 hours.

As with any hi-tech service outage, it’s appropriate to look at whether the official response was adequate. In this case, Sony’s obviously was not.

I first got wind of the problem at around 3 p.m. PST, reading a Twitter update from Game Informer’s. I learned PS3 Trophy information was gone, and I couldn’t play any games. That was two hours before Sony itself acknowledged the problem and said it was looking into it.

Before I knew it, Sony customers blew the story wide open. Reports of internal clock issues were everywhere, mainly stemming from the popular gaming forum NeoGAF. By midnight, one user had posted a FAQ on who was affected, what to do and what’s at risk by turning on your console.

That’s exactly what Sony should’ve done. Instead, the company waited until Monday morning, when spokesman Patrick Seybold posted a message explaining the errors. That was the last we heard from Sony. Among the perfectly valid questions that were unanswered: How will a fix will be delivered to people who can’t go online? Will people get their trophies back?

Sony still has some explaining to do, and gamers deserve an apology not just for the outage itself, but for being kept in the dark…

Sony has since then officially fixed the bug and now the playstation network back up and running.

Qualcomm’s awesome Snapdragon, the most powerful mobile processor, powers many new smartphones like the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 and the Google Nexus will soon see an update in the form of faster versions.  We would be seeing faster, more powerful updates of the Snapdragon processors running at 1.3GHz and 1.5GHz. The current Snapdragon processor has a clocking speed of 1GHz.

Qualcomm’s SVP of product management has confirmed that these should be out there before we celebrate the 2011 New Year.

The 1.3GHZ variant will be called the Snapdragon 8X50A.  This is a 45nm version, of the current 1GHZ processor.  Manufacturers will get to see the chips by the end of January and the first devices run on it should be here by early next year or even in later 2010.

Next in line, the 8X72, the biggie!  This will be a dual core chip with TWO 1.5GHZ cores inside! The 8X72 will be capable of processing full high definition content and the first products based on it should be seen during the time of the CES 2011.

Sony will be showing off some of their new notebooks at the CES.  Among the new notebooks at the show will be the sleek Vaio Z and Vaio F series machines.  The new Z-series sports an ultraportable design with a carbon fiber chassis.

Each machine weighs only a bit more than three pounds and has a 13.1-inch LCD that is LED backlit and has 100% color saturation on some models. Other features include Blu-ray drive, dynamic hybrid graphics, optional 3G, 512GB SSD option plus lots more.

The larger Vaio F notebook has a 16.4-inch LCD and option Blu-ray drive.  The machine uses NVIDIA GeForce graphics and Sony Transfer Jet software for moving photos and video to and from the notebook.  It uses an Intel Core i7 CPUs and more.  The Z-series will ship in late spring starting at $1,900.  The F series available for pre-order today starting at $1000.

We’ve got to admit, having played with the mirasol ebook prototype earlier today, Sony’s pre-sale of their Reader Daily Edition is looking marginally less appealing.  Priced at $399.99, the Sony Reader Daily Edition has a 7-inch monochrome e-ink display, integrated 3G connectivity, and weighs 12.75oz; wireless access to Sony’s ebook store is included in the sticker price.

As well as content from Sony’s ebook store, the Reader Daily Edition will also play nicely with PDF, Word, BBeB, ePub and other text formats.  You can highlight blocks of text and add notes with the included stylus, or use the on-screen keyboard if your handwriting is illegible, and there’s an onboard dictionary for checking up confusing words.

Battery life is rated at up to 2.5 weeks from a single charge, though you’ll only see that sort of longevity if the wireless is shut off.  Switch it on and you’re looking at more like a week’s worth of use.  Actual deliveries are expected to arrive sometime between December 18th and January 8th, which is a pretty large window if you’re considering giving the Sony Reader Daily Edition as a holiday gift.

Press Release:

SONY READER DAILY EDITION NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-SALE AT SONYSTYLE.COM

SAN DIEGO – November 18, 2009 Delivering on its promise to give consumers a variety of choices, Sony today announced its newest addition to the Sony Reader Family — the Reader Daily Edition™ — is now available for pre-order on SonyStyle.com. The Reader Daily Edition, a highly-anticipated wireless model with 3G connectivity, will ship next month.

The Reader Daily Edition joins the Reader Pocket Edition™ and Reader Touch Edition™ to round out Sony’s complete family of digital readers. The Reader Daily Edition gives consumers wireless access to Sony’s eBookstore from most of the U.S., via a 3G mobile broadband network. Book lovers will be able to browse, purchase and download books as well as select newspapers and magazines on the go. There are no monthly fees or transaction charges for the basic wireless connectivity and users still have the option to side load personal documents or content from other compatible sites via USB. Sony will announce newspaper and magazine content providers within the next month.

The Reader Daily Edition features a responsive, menu-driven, seven-inch touch screen panel that enables quick, intuitive navigation, page turning, highlighting and note taking with the swipe of a finger or by using the included stylus pen. Users can take handwritten notes with the stylus pen or type with the virtual keyboard. All notes can be exported and printed out for easy reference. The Reader Touch Edition includes an onboard Oxford American English Dictionary that allows you to look up a word by simply tapping on it.

For more details on the Reader Daily Edition please visit sonystyle.com; Sony’s online destination for book lovers – wordsmoveme.com; or the Sony Electronics Community, which includes a corporate blog, video, photos, polls and profiles. For a list of all the Sony Electronics community sites please visit:

Key Facts:

o Sony’s new Reader Daily Edition is now on sale at SonyStyle.com.

o The Reader Daily Edition provides wireless access to Sony’s eBookstore from most of the U.S.

o Wireless access is provided by a 3G mobile broadband network.

o The Reader Daily Edition’s seven-inch wide, full touch screen display provides intuitive navigation and comfortable layout of content, including newspapers and magazines, in portrait or landscape orientation.

o In portrait mode, about 30-35 lines of text are visible, making the experience very similar to that of a printed paperback book.

o A high contrast ratio with 16 levels of grayscale ensures that text and images are crisp and easy to read.

o The Reader Daily Edition features an attractive aluminum body with an integrated protective cover.

o Easy access to the embedded dictionary with a simple double-tap on a word for its meaning.

o The Reader Daily Edition has enough internal memory to hold more than one thousand standard eBooks and expansion slots for memory cards to hold even more.

o It will sell for about $399.

o Newspaper and magazine content providers to be unveiled within the next month.

Quotes:

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division: “We firmly believe consumers should have choice in every aspect of their digital reading experience. With the availability of the Reader Daily Edition, we are delivering on that promise. We now have the most comprehensive family of devices on the market, the greatest access to free and affordable eBooks through The eBook Store from Sony and our affiliated ecosystem, and now round out our Reader offering with a wireless device that lets consumer purchase and download content on the go.”

Sony has unveiled the latest eBook Library software 3.0.01 update that will enable easier management and purchase of e-books alongside the ability to transfer them over to a variety of Sony Reader models including the PRS-300, PRS-505 and PRS-600. Apart from that, a new feature includes Windows 7 support, coupled with fixes to several issues such as prevention of crash when transferring content to a Reader occasionally. Windows 7 users would do well to uninstall version 3.0 prior to installing the new version, while folks running on XP and Vista can just run the update straight away.

Netflix movie streaming, once available only for computers, the Xbox 360, and some Blu-Ray players, will soon be offered for the Playstation 3.

How will they do it? For unknown reasons, the software will not be integrated directly into the system. Instead, a Netflix subscriber can request a free disc with Netflix installed as a BD-Live feature. BD-Live is a system normally used to allow a movie’s special features to be downloaded from the Internet, rather than limited to content placed directly on the disc.

The cost of the Netflix service itself is the same no matter what you watch it on. However, Netflix subscribers using the Xbox 360 must also pay $50 per year for Xbox Live. The PS3 has no extra costs.

We have been enjoying the new cheaper PS3 Slim in the US and other countries for a while now. In fact we are already looking forward to the 250GB PS3 Slim coming stateside next month. In Malaysia, gamers have not been able to get their hands on the PS3 Slim yet. Sony announced today that the PS3 Slim would hit the Malaysian market on October 31.

The machine coming to the country will have a 120GB HDD and be offered in the traditional PS3 black only. Gamers in Malaysia will also be able to get their hands on the PSP Go as well as accessories for the PS3 Slim. Among the PS3 accessories will be a vertical stand to make placing the console easier. The stand will launch on October 31 along with the console.

The PS3 Slim will sell for RM1,299 and the PSP Go will sell for RM1,099. The vertical stand will be priced at RM82. The version of the PSP Go coming to Malaysia is the same 16GB version we have in the US and is available in other countries. Sony will hold a special launch event on the 31st at the One Utama Shopping Mall.