So for those of you who weren't up at 3 a.m. and happened to miss Brian Ashcraft's post from Japan and Truman's post from London, here's a round-up of all of the lovely new Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable news that Sony vomitted out at their impromptu press conference.

Playstation 3
Apparently Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutagari took to the stage and got straight to it.

The Playstation 3 will be delayed in Japan, but thankfully that won't effect the release date elsewhere, because Sony is going for the global launch this November. To avoid hitting the same issues Msoft had with their "global " launch of the Xbox 360, Sony plans to pump out a million consoles a month. Of course, I'm sure Microsoft has simular plans, so we'll see how that goes.

The PS3 will have built-in Blu-Ray readers (apparently the cause of the delay) and all games will come out on Blu-Ray to combat piracy. The PS3 will also play DVDs, CDs and both PS2 and PSOne games. Hot Damn.

Sony is currently hammering out an online network that they have named the Playstation Network Platform and plan to be free.

Here's a really strange thing. Taking a page from Microsoft's launch, the PS3 will support a hard drive, but it may be something you have to buy seperately. To make matters much, much, much, insanely worse, the 60 GB hard drive will be REQUIRED to play games. That's right, you may be able to buy a PS3 that doesn't actually play games. Go figure.

The hard drive will come loaded with Linux and work as a home server that connects directly to the Internet.

Playstation Portable

Almost as exciting as the PS3 news, were some pretty major announcements for Sony's handheld.

Starting March 22, the PSP is dropping in price from $249 to $199. The new cheaper PSP won't include the memory stick, case, remote or headphones from the Value Pack.

Sometime in October, Sony will be releasing a snap-on Eye Toy camera for the PSP which will be used for games and VOIP. It sounds like video VOIP to me, which just kicks too much ass.

The PSP will also be getting an emulator that will allow it to play PSOne games. And get this, the games will be downloaded directly to the PSP via the network. Now they've got to come out with a new model with built-in memory, don't you think?

Down the line Sony also plans to release a GPS and RSS Feed and Macromedia Flash support.

Keep in mind that all of this information came out during a press conference that was initially meant to be only a developers meeting. Oddly, the official press releases put out by SCEA only talk about the release date and Blu-ray support for the PS3 and the new price for the PSP. Isn't that weird?

This obvious attempt at damage control has certainly worked, but I expect that some of this information is still not exactly set in stone. Especially given the fact that most of it wasn't sent out in press releases.

Send an email to the author of this post at .