As expected, Sony revealed the price, looks and launch details of its much-hyped gaming console - PlayStation 4 (Sony PS4) - at the pre-E3 press conference held in Los Angeles on Monday.
Sony PS4 will cost $399 and its launch will happen in the US this holiday season though the date of release is yet to be made known. For a change, the Japanese electronics giants will allow owners to trade their PS4 game discs and players don't have to sign in online to play, which will please gamers.
Sony chief executive Andrew House described the next-generation gaming console as "unparalleled power" while unveiling the looks of PS4 at E3, the world's premier trade show for computer and video games which will be held from 11-13 June at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
With price of the gaming console $100 cheaper than Microsoft's Xbox One, which will cost $499 when it is launched in the US this November, even avid fans of Xbox will be tempted to try their hands on Sony PS4. Moreover, allowing gamers to buy cheaper pre-owned games is expected to boost its popularity.
Interestingly, Sony PS4 and Xbox One look similar at least from afar. Both are black in colour with sharp angles.
Sony had earlier revealed some specifications of the new console at an event in February, followed by revelation of the 'mock-up' designs of the PlayStation 4 (Sony PS4) controller and eye at the Games Developers Conference (GDC) 2013 in San Francisco, California.
The new gaming console is powered by single-chip custom processor and x86-64 AMD "Jaguar" 8 Cores. It features 18 "compute units" capable of cranking out 1.84 TFLOPS and AMD next generation Radeon based graphics engine. The console will also have a memory of 8GB GDDR5 RAM capable of 176GB/sec of bandwidth.
