Hello again video gamers, we’re at that product life cycle period of the PlayStation when the said product goes beyond maturity, declines, and then gives way to the emergence of a new, updated and even more innovative product. It has been almost 7 years since Sony released the PlayStation 3. Now it seems the console’s developers have set their sights to the next generation of video game technology, announcing their upcoming project, the release of a new PlayStation console at Sony’s press event on the 20th of February.
First things first; yes we can officially confirm that it will be called the PlayStation 4 (No surprise there). Mark Cerny, lead architect of Sony’s PlayStation 4 console confirmed this during the press conference. He then went ahead to give a detailed revelation of the specs of the upcoming console. Not everything was revealed however, but here’s what we do know: It has an X86 CPU which he referred to as the Supercharged PC Architecture, which has 8 CPU cores. It also has the enhanced PC grahics unit (GPU), and also what is apparently a big deal to them- 8 Gigabytes of unified RAM. The RAM is GDDR5 system memory, and for those of you who don’t know what that means (or and don’t care), it means the system would be super fast.
Next, we got to see the controller, which was basically the same one that was leaked on the internet a while ago. It does have a touch pad, and also a ‘share’ button for you social network nerds. On the front of the controller, there will be a ‘light bar’ to distinguish players. So basically one player could be red, the other green, blue and so on. As regards the controller, here’s where it gets interesting: There will be a motion sensor in the controller to give the controller some move-like abilities- you know, tilt left and something happens, tilt right and something else happens, shake it and yet another ‘something’ happens, whatever.
Cerny also mentioned a ‘standby’ mode. So instead of powering down, you could easily put it to sleep, and resume your game from wherever you stopped the last time (works especially well if you don’t have to deal with interrupted power supply ^_^.)
Now one of Sony’s biggest challenge is matching up with Xbox’s fluid user interface. We did get to see a little of the PlayStation 4’s user interface, but I’m sure we’d see some more of it at the E3 convention.
After all was said and done, sadly, we did not get to see the new console itself. There is still as yet no official image for the PlayStation 4. There was a silver lining though. We did get to see the words “COMING HOLIDAY 2013” on the screen at the end of the presentation. So there you have it people. If you didn’t have an idea for the perfect holiday gift, now you do. As you get ready for the next generation of video game technology, we at TechCity will keep you informed as further details become available to us.
