Sony is preparing to launch a new version of the PS3.
The news didn’t come from any sort of official announcement from Sony, at least not yet. However, there’s a new page on the official Japanese Playstation website for a brand new model.
According to the page, the new model name is CECH-3000B and it will be available in the same 160 GB and 320 GB configurations that the current PS3 systems have.
Additionally, Sony has managed to reduce the power consumption of the game console from 230 watts to 200 watts.
This will be just the latest addition to the PS3’s already huge library of SKUs. The system started out with full, near 100% PS2 backward compatibility and four USB ports and a multi-card reader, then changed to a two-USB device with emulation-based PS2 compatibility and no card reader, and today’s models have absolutely no support for PS2 games.
In the midst of all that, Sony has also created all sorts of different models with varying hard drive capacities. In total, no fewer than a dozen different versions of the PS3 have been introduced. The same kind of wild changes have also come to the Xbox 360, but Nintendo’s Wii console has remained almost entirely unchanged over the past five years.
So for Sony, a new PS3 model doesn’t seem that far out of the ordinary. As for when it will be available and if there will any changes to the price, those details remain unclear. What we do know is it will be the model used for the upcoming Tales of Xillia special edition hardware (pictured), which is due out in Japan in the next several months.
