Yesterdays Sony Conference was definitely full of news, but the main piece of news that everyone was hoping for has finally been revealed. PS3 will launch in early November, and what’s more, that’s going to be an XBox 360 style global launch for Asia, the US and Europe! So much for the spring release, like we believed that anyway.

Sony obviously don’t want to appear to be beaten by Microsoft, and the statement made by Ken Kutaragi said that 4 million units would be available for shipping by that time, with a further 2 million promised before the year end. With the console set to go into production around June, this would certainly give enough time for a decent stock base to be accumulated, so we can but wait to see if Sony can pull off a global launch better than Microsoft, who all things considered did do an excellent job of a global launch, the first worldwide launch of a console ever seen. It’s also worth bearing in mind that Sony did promise a global launch for PSP, which famously never happened.

A November launch would appear a good idea though, since it allows consoles to be made, and crucially gives developers that little bit more breathing space to produce a good launch lineup of games. It could also avoid too much disappointment caused by a shortage of machines, as happened with PSP.

But that wasn’t all that Sony had to shout about. They also announced that PS3 will ship with a 60GB hard drive (which can be upgraded to a large size later if needed) and that this will be a part of the base console as it is a necessity for the PS3 to also act as a media server. It is also claimed that the PS3 will be capable of running a version of Linux, which will be instrumental in Sony’s other big announcement, that of PS3’s network service.

Sony claim that the PS3 will have, at launch, a completely free online service offering game lobbies, player matching, voice chat and software download facilities. It’s thought that the download service may even extend to a similar system as Nintendo are planning with Revolution, with the ability to download PS1 and PS2 titles to the machine. PS3 is backward compatible with both older machines, and is also said to upgrade the graphics of these games in a similar way to how PS2 could improve PS1’s video output.

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