New Sony Playstation 3 - now cheaper and with less features.

Good news for those with smaller wallets a wonderful new 40Gb version of the PS3 is coming (has come) to Europe. Eschewing such fripperies as four USB ports (opting for two), memory card slots, and backwards compatibility, it retains the niceties like Wi-Fi and HDMI.

Screech! Apply the brakes there, the new 40Gb model will feature no backwards compatibility for PS2 games none, zip, zero. According to Kotaku it's that cost issue, as it stands you need some extra semiconductors to run ye olden PS2 games; remove them and you have to drop down to a purely software emulator which is problematic.

Now I'm scratching my head here; in Japan and the US the initial release is with a hardware version of the backwards compatibility, with two different models up for grabs. When it gets released in Europe the hardware (or apparently most of it) gets ditched and we get the whopping great choice of only one model available. When Sony made the decision to drop hardware in the states they sweeten the deal by kicking in an 80Gb hard drive, here they remove all hardware and the memory card slots, and two of the USB ports, and drop the hard drive down to 40Gb.

Nope still scratching my head here. Could it be simply that Europe is acting as Sony's testbed the 'Heck if it don't work at least we haven't annoyed anyone that really matters' approach?

On the importance of backwards compatibility to Sony Europe the latest release is v1.93 now check out their b/c list Now forgive me, but wasn't this the very company that lambasted Microsoft for it's software driven compatibility, stated multiple times how this was a cornerstone of the Playstation philosophy, that is now turning its back on the user base in Europe and simply saying meh?

Oh the plus side this is an addition to the line-up (do I hear those cynical Christmas bells a-tinklin'?) so the 60Gb with b/c and slots is still available... for the moment.

reflecting both the reduced emphasis placed on this feature amongst later purchasers of PS3, as well as the availability of a more extensive line-up of PS3 specific titles (a total of 65 titles across all genres by Christmas).

Oh look there's that magic word Christmas, but besides that - excuse me "reduced emphasis" by later purchasers, try can't bloody afford one at the moment and won't bloody buy one if the only way to do so forces me to buy a whole new bunch of games to play on the dratted thing when there isn't anything out on it worth playing yet.

What with Bioshock and now this I'm really starting to look at the XBox 360 with covetous eyes.