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Playstation 4 Kicks Off Next Console Generation

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Sony fires the starting pistol for the next generation games console race as it unveils the (un)imaginatively named Playstation 4 at the Hammerstein Ballroom, New York.

PS4 LaunchAs a successor to the 7-year old Playstation 3, the console tries hard to impress both consumers and developers-- Sony drops the esoteric "Cell" architecture in favour of a PC-style 8-core x86 processor, an enhanced GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, a combination producing up to 1.84 Teraflops of processing power.

Interestingly the PS4 will ship with a redesigned version of the Kinect-style Eye camera peripheral. It carries dual camera lenses and x4 microphones, which Sony says will handle log in procedures via face recognition.

The familiar Dual Shock controller also gets a slight redesign through the addition of a touchpad, stereo cameras (to work in tandem with the Eye), headphone jack and a "share" button allowing users to instantly record and share game footage.

KillzoneConsumers might be disappointed to learn the PS4 is not backwards-compatible with PS3 discs-- if one wants to play older games they will have to resort to streaming, courtesy of recent Sony acquisition Gaikai. The cloud gaming service will allow users to instantly play downloaded games and demos without waiting for entire files to download, stream games to the Playstation Vita handheld console and handle integration with Facebook and UStream.

“By combining the PS4, the PlayStation Network and social platforms, our goal is to become the social platform for gaming,” Gaikai creator Dave Perry says.

Following a handful of game announcements (with titles from the likes of Guerilla, Media Molecule, Ubisoft and Capcom), the event ended with a launch date reveal-- "Holiday 2013." Expect more details on both PS4 and Microsoft's sure-to-follow next gen rival following the June 2013 E3 show.