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Sony has revealed that the UK market will be getting their own version of the Gran Turismo PSP Entertainment Pack. We are assuming that it will be some sort of variation on the one destined for the US, due out late October.

We already know that the US pack contains a Mystic Silver PSP-3000, a copy of the GT PSP game, a voucher for a PSN movie download, a music voucher and a Sony 2GB Pro Duo memory stick.

There is no release date set yet for the UK bundle but we don’t think it will be too far behind the US, which probably means a late October or early November release.psp

The launch of the revised Slim PS3 has given Sony a huge sales boost, with them selling 38,000 consoles more than they did the previous week, This represents a whopping 104% week-on-week increase. Next week should see even bigger gains as the figures were taken pre September 1 when the new console wasn’t fully available.

Thanks to the recent price cut Microsoft’s Xbox 360 saw a 32% sales increase, selling 74,689 units compared with 56,448 during the pre-price cut week. Total Xbox 360 sales were just 1,242 units shy of the PS3’s total.

Without a revised console or a price cut to boost sales, Nintendo saw a 4% drop in the same week. Despite this it still sold an impressive 74,245 units, only a few hundred shy of the Xbox and less than 2,000 off the PS3.

Toshiba is doing what was unthinkable just a few years ago and launching their very own Blu-ray player. The Toshiba BDX2000 will be released in November and supports Profile 2.0 BD-Live, their own REGZA-Link connection technology and outputs 1080p at 24 frames per second. As for audio it will decode and pass-through Dolby True HD / DTS-HD Master Audio. It will retail for a modest $250 when launched.

Toshiba’s press documentation even stated ‘This product does not play HD-DVD discs’, just to make sure there’s no hope of a HD-DVD resurrection.

Sony Europe have finally today confirmed that the PlayStation 3 Slim will be released during its press conference at GamesCom.

Sony chief Kazuo Hirai stated that the new slim console will go on sale during the first week of September and will have a 120GB hard drive.

The Slim PS3 will retail for 299 EURO and will be sold alongside the current model which will receive a price drop effective as of tomorrow. Please look back for further details on the new Slim PS3.

The Telegraph reports that Sony have placed orders for enough console components to double the production of PS3’s over the next three months. This move leads us to think that Sony are expecting a massive increase in demand which could only be caused by the introduction of a Slim version of the PS3 games console.

Retailer Amazon.com is showing a release date for the long awaited driving sim Gran Turismo 5. Their site is stating a 29 December release, which seem a little odd to us being the week after Christmas and after the years biggest sales period. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see but at least it’s looking a little closer than sometime next year.

According to engadget, Sony are due to release a Red and Blue edition of their DualShock 3 controller in the US this coming October. This will complement the existing Black and Silver DS3′s already available. There is no word on whether these will be available in Europe.

Downloadable game Battlefield 1943 has seen at least 600,000 downloads on Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live since launch just over two weeks ago. It was also the fastest selling first day and first week download-only game. It looks like these results may make other developers sit up and take note.

June’s NPD hardware sales figures are out and they reveal that the PlayStation 3 sold just over 164,000 consoles with the Xbox 360 selling 240,600 units in the same period. The Wii was again the leader with 361,000 sales.

The Sony corporation are finding themselves with a large problem in the form of their PlayStation 3 console.

Internal Problems
It appears that they still can’t make money based on the consoles current price and as a result, despite intense pressure, are refusing to drop the price further. The PS3 has been at its current retail price for such a long time that it now looks very expensive, even the long-standing argument that you get a ‘free’ Blu-ray player included with the PS3 no longer washes, especially when a stand-alone Blu-ray player can be had for around £120 or less. Sure you get integrated wireless connectivity and free online gaming with the PS3, but not everybody wants these, nor are they essential to the PS3 gaming experience. As well as the perceived lack of value that the PS3 provides, the persistent rumours of a impending price reduction and/or a slim version are sure to keep potential buyers from making a purchase any time soon. Sony therefore has a dilemma. Reduce the price to enable them to keep existing and attract new customers to the Sony brand but loose money in the process, or leave the price alone, loose a minimum amount on each unit but risk loosing customers to main rival Microsoft and their Xbox 360 console. From a financial perspective at least they will sell fewer units with the latter options and therefore loose less money, although at the detriment to long term strategy due to the erosion of the PlayStation user base, something that needs to be avoided in the competitive games console world.

Microsoft Problems
Despite the PS3′s current woes, I think the biggest problem for Sony is yet to come. I think this problem will come from Microsoft in the form of a new Xbox console much sooner than anyone is expecting. Such a product, released as a successor to the Xbox 360, would surely be the worst possible news for Sony. The hype of a new console and the demand that this creates would not only steal buyers away from Sony but it would cement the current generation of Xbox users firmly in the Microsoft camp, especially if full backwards compatibility is included. Judging by the furore over the lack of PS3 backward compatibility it would surely be crazy to overlook this feature. A further knock on effect of a new Xbox would be that developers may, in light of falling hardware (and hence software sales), drop the Sony platform altogether to concentrate on the new Microsoft console. That it is a well-known fact that the PS3 is hard to write software for will only make dropping support for it more likely. This is only my opinion, but a new Microsoft console brought to market in the next 18 months would be perfect timing for Microsoft and could cause irreparable damage to Sony’s gaming division. It could even spell the end for the PlayStation series of gaming machines and this is something that any consumer should not want to see.

Final Thoughts
Maybe the rumoured Slim PS3 will become a reality and be used as a tool to counteract a possible attack from Microsoft? Sony’s current stance of doing nothing certainly won’t work for much longer. Monopolies are no good for anyone, except the company with the monopoly. Windows operating system anyone?