While Nintendo has yet to confirm its upcoming trio of new DS Lite colors for Europe (and hopefully the rest of us soon after), the much-leaked units have already been spotted in the wild and unboxed for your viewing pleasure. In addition to its regular warnings about getting outside and not hitting people in the face, Nintendo might want to inform consumers on the danger of eating their handheld consoles -- we'd hate to see unsuspecting Advance Wars fans succumbing to the incredible temptation these new colors present. Now, how about a little bit of confirmation and release dates for these, Nintendo?

Source: http://www.engadget.com/

Giant warlords (like Microsoft and Sony) are poised for a tech-toy shootout, writes SCOTT COLBOURNE

Prashanth's Global update :
November 17, 2006 at 1:48 PM EST

As of late November, some gigantic corporations have been engaged in a life-and-dollars struggle to deliver good times to your living room.

New video-game consoles from Sony, which launched its PlayStation 3, and Nintendo, with its little Wii, are joining Microsoft's Xbox 360 on holiday wish lists. In these early days, all three machines are squarely aimed at current gamers — you know, the people lining up in the snow, sleet and dark of night to get one this weekend. But to varying degrees they are also being positioned as home-entertainment hubs and one-stop virtual malls where users can access music, movies and photos, plus surf and communicate online. They have the potential to bring digital distribution, which has driven the growth of Apple and its iTunes Music Store, to your TV screen along with high-definition content and more Mario.

My goal here, having undertaken the gruelling task of opening boxes, plugging things in and playing with them, is to help gamers choose the right system, to aid parents who still pronounce Wii like "why" instead of "we," and to enlighten innocent bystanders besieged by ads they don't understand.

Up until now, Sony has virtually owned the game-console market with its PlayStation line, selling over 110-million PlayStation 2s compared with around 25-million units each for Microsoft's first Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube.

After spending time with the three latest contenders, it looks like the race to sign up devotees is going to be much closer in this generation of tech toys, and each machine could make inroads with newbies.

Sony's PlayStation 3 looks like something George Foreman might use to grill meat.

This thing has heft. Its glossy black top is curved and seems to draw fingerprints out of thin air.

An inspection of its inputs and card slots reveals that Sony is finally leaving behind the days of forcing buyers to use its proprietary and often expensive cables and accessories. The PS3 is able to handle memory cards and devices such as cameras and digital music players made by its competitors, and it has a variety of standard outputs for connecting cables to stereos and TVs.

Turn it on and some very computer-like things begin happening, including the need to download a system update. The interface that appears on the screen is much like the one for Sony's PlayStation Portable, or PSP. A menu bar stretches horizontally and has icons for music and video (including high-definition Blu-ray movies), photos and online access. And games — almost forgot those things.

Thankfully for a device that seeks to be a cornerstone of home theatres, the PS3 is whisper quiet. Its closest competitor in the multimedia and games market, the Xbox 360, is hampered by a cooling system that can sound like a remote-control helicopter trying to take off. Microsoft says it is going to respond to Sony's engineering feat, but has not set a date.

One of the options on the PS3's menu is called "remote play" and it offers a good example of what Sony is up to with this living-room Trojan horse. Sony's PSP can wirelessly hook up to the PS3 to access its hard drive. You can be in the kitchen with your PSP listening to music stored on the PS3 in the den, or slide a Blu-ray disc into the PS3 and then watch it elsewhere on the PSP. Sony has plans to make this connection work over the Internet as well, so that you could be in Seattle with your PSP, have the PS3 on and connected at home, and then conduct slideshows of family photos or watch a home movie.

The PS3 lets you browse the Internet on your TV (and use wireless keyboards and mice to do so) and Sony has created an online service called the PlayStation Network that it hopes will match Microsoft's Xbox Live, which will begin offering downloads of TV shows and high-definition movies in the United States this week (the Canadian debut is coming, Microsoft says). Sony's service has a store that will also eventually feature music and video downloads, and out of the box it allows users to play games online.

In the short term, those games should be the most important feature of the many things the PS3 can do, but on that front, at least for this holiday buying season, the 360 has a distinct edge. Among the short list of four exclusives for Sony's machine, the marquee game is Resistance: Fall of Man, a science-fiction shooter. It is technically impressive — the PS3 has plenty of play potential under the hood — but Microsoft's one-year head start has been a boon to developers. Gears of War, released this week, is winning over game reviewers — including this one — and is selling briskly. And the 360 finally has a worthy all-ages online game in Viva Pinata, which lets youngsters care for surreal virtual beings.

Ultimately, my advice is to dial down hopes of unwrapping a PS3 this year, especially given the pummelling that demand will probably hand out to supply as Sony struggles to get enough machines to stores. The PS3, with more quality games, will be a better buy in 2007 than it is now.

That leaves Nintendo's Wii. The idiosyncratic Japanese company is charting its own course into the next generation, as usual. The Wii is the smallest of the new devices, about the size of three DVD cases stacked together, and it exudes cuteness.

Hit the power button and the interface that pops up has glowing bubbles that Nintendo calls channels. Nintendo is finally embracing the online world so the Wii works with wireless Internet connections, or Wi-Fi, and it will continue to access the network even in standby mode. There is a forecast channel for weather updates and one for news with a spinning globe so you can select your region of interest.

The first thing to do with the Wii is to set up a "mii." This is your 3-D representative in the odd world Nintendo creates on — or in, it seems at times — your TV. You choose a face and body and then the little mii will start popping up in games. And your mii can visit other people's consoles and then you can have a parade.

Yes, going from a game subtitled Fall of Man to this Wii world was a shock, I will say that.

But the Wii's real hook is its controller, or the "wiimote." The two-piece wonder can be moved any which way and your on-screen stand-in will respond in kind. Swing it like a tennis racket or golf club in Wii Sports, which ships with the system, or turn it like a steering wheel in the awesomely named Excite Truck. My concern going in was that the sensors might struggle outside of the safe test conditions where I had previously encountered the Wii, but it worked well with little setup and no fussing.

Nintendo is hoping that a broad audience of people turned off by the current game landscape and its complicated control schemes will buy into the multiplayer fun of the Wii, just as many new users have discovered its dual-screen portable, the DS. I get the feeling the Wii is going to please a lot of families — and upset plenty of downstairs neighbours listening to virtual sword fights and tennis games take place above them.

But here is some advice that applies to all the consoles: Try before you buy. With the Wii, that test session, much like this next generation of video-game machines, will be fun to watch.

Nintendo marketing chief George Harrison recently talked about how Nintendo doesn't pay much attention to the competition.

According to Harrison, PS3 and Xbox 360 are playing tug-of-war with the same customer and trading market share back and forth between each other and that it has no affect on Wii sales.

"We don’t focus a lot on the competition," he told Next Generation. "It appears to us that Sony (PS3) and Microsoft (Xbox 360) are fighting over the same customer and swapping market share. Our performance seems to be independent of those two."

Nintendo is also highly focused on keeping the third party games coming.

"Certainly, there’s a strong lineup of third party titles, and we’re trying to encourage them to make them. But we’re also trying to encourage third parties to take the time and effort to make something unique, not just to sort of throw something out on Wii because the it’s the fast-selling system. I think the ones that have spent the most time in the box are the ones that are going to be the most successful this holiday," he explained.

As was the case last year, there is still a shortage of Wiis on the market this holiday season.

The PS3 didn't exactly sprint out of the gates, but it has been making up some serious ground lately. Even so, can it really be on par with the most popular video game console in history, which just so happens to be the PS3's predecessor? Well, lest we forget, the PS2 had a somewhat rocky start as well, and Sony's Sir Howard Stringer believes the PS3 is actually "on par" with the PS2 and could eventually equal - or even surpass - the last-gen system's success.

According to an e-mail interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Stringer wrote that the recent price drop and aggressive marketing tactics were both "planned by the PlayStation group," and everything is running along smoothly. In fact, he believes the momentum is now "the same as it was with the PlayStation 2." Sales are rising and the games are here - with many more to come - so that's all good news, and the numbers can't be too bad. Stringer also said the PS3 wasn't "behind the curve compared to the PlayStation 2 in terms of momentum." We have yet to learn how North American gamers responded to that price drop and the new 40GB PS3, but if Japan is any indication, it should be more good news for Sony's next-gen console.

Granted, there's a long way to go before the PS3 comes even close to the 120 million units sold the PS2 managed, but Sony remains firm on its goal for 11 million PS3s sold before the end of the fiscal year. And of course, Sony has claimed the lifespan of the PS3 is "ten years." ...you do the math.

While consumers have been complaining about the cost of the PlayStation 3, developers have been complaining about the cost of working on Sony's next-gen platform. The development kit has never been cheap for the PS3 - good luck to smaller, independent teams - but things are changing. Sony has already dropped the retail price of the PS3 and now, they're halving the price of that development kit.

According to PR-Inside, Sony has slashed that very high cost in half, so the numbers now look like this for the PlayStation 3 development package- $10,250 in North America (it was $20k up until now), 950,000 yen ($8,600 USD) in Japan, and ¤7,500 ($11,250 USD) in Europe. Obviously, you'll still have to pony up a significant amount of cash to get your PS3 game project off the ground, but hey, $10k sounds a lot better than $20k, doesn't it? One of the biggest stumbling blocks a lot of teams face is the lack of start-up money for their vision, and when it comes to the PS3, that's an expensive proposition. But now that Sony has made this move, we should start seeing a lot more games hit the market, and from a larger variety of developers and publishers.

In addition, many analysts are predicting yet another hardware price drop some time early next year, perhaps in time for the anticipated blockbusters like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. So overall, the cost of the PS3, from developer to gamer, is definitely coming down.

If you think the PlayStation brand is big now, just wait until the PlayStation Phone arrives. That's right, according to Xuecast.com, this is definitely going to happen: Sony is currently working on this new phone project to bring the two worlds of video gaming and portable communication together. Evidently, a "high-ranking official" inside Sony Japan made the confirmation yesterday.

Sony has already submitted an application for a mobile telecommunication device with video game functionality to the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office, so it seems this endeavor is in full effect. Remember, the Sony Ericsson phone has been very popular, and to blend the PlayStation world and the mobile phone seems like a win-win proposition.

"The Playstation is a proven success and so is Sony Ericsson," said Jim Ryan, Sony Computer Entertainment's Co-Chief Operation Officer. "Convergence with the two arms working together is definitely plausible. It is hugely intellectually seductive to have a console oriented phone."

Hey, if you have two uber-popular brand names, than how could it be a bad thing to combine them? We still don't have any specific details on the PlayStation Phone, and we do wonder just how competent it will be as a video game unit, but that's almost irrelevant. What matters is the name, and if it can sell. So said Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Analyst at Gartner Research Firm- "While the Cybershot and Walkman are better selling brands from the Sony fold, Playstation almost enjoys cult status and two strong brands, Sony Ericsson and Playstation would make a strong success story for Sony." Yup, makes sense.

We'll let you know as soon as we hear anything else about this nifty new gadget. And until we see some sort of official press release, we can't really say it's "official."

Not long after the PS2 turned the ripe old age of seven, Sony celebrated the PS3's first birthday. On November 16, the new console officially became one year old, and despite an admittedly slow start, business is definitely climbing.

According to GameDaily, Sony has sold 5.6 million PS3 units worldwide, and 2 million of those sales came in North America. They have not altered their goal for March, which still sits at 11 million, and of course, the PS3 continues to outsell the Xbox 360 in Japan by a large margin. The Nintendo Wii, on the other hand, continues its dominance, although it's appearing temporary at this point. As far as PS3 software goes, 28 million units have been sold worldwide, and North America accounts for exactly 1/4 of those sales. Sony plans to release 160 new PS3 titles (where have we seen that number before?) before the end of the fiscal year, and that features 19 exclusive first and third-party games. As for multiplatform woes due to developers first making a game on another console and porting it to the PS3, Sony says those days are rapidly disappearing.

"Developers are now creating games on PS3 and then porting them to other platforms. This shows the strides developers are making in creating content for PS3 and also provides developers with an advantage as it's harder to port from Xbox 360 to PS3. Ubisoft's Haze is the first title to be created on PS3 and ported to Xbox. When we designed PS3 our goal was to introduce a system so technically advanced that it could stand the test of time and could take the industry in a whole new direction, which for PS3 was high-definition entertainment," said Jack Tretton, President and CEO of SCEA. "While we're excited by the progress we've made this first year, we know that like our other platforms, the best is still yet to come, especially given our new hardware and software line-up, and that PS3 will continue to take the industry to new heights for years to come." (source- GameDaily)

The PlayStation Network is looking good, too. Even though there are only 3 million members - Xbox Live boasts 8 million - those 3 million have occurred only in the past year; it took five years for Live to reach 8 million, remember. Sony also says over 60 million pieces of content have been downloaded, which translates to about 12.3 per member. It'll be interesting to see how all these numbers change when the PS3 celebrates its second birthday...

But I am thinking of getting a Xbox 360 instead of a PS3, when i go abroad next month :p