Same here.
Is the 20gb PS3 still going to be released or are Sony scrapping it?
It's still due for release before the end of the year at a cut price. A Sony strategy for attracting more Christmas sales, I think.
Well to get a premium and the add on HD DVD Drive is still cheaper then the PS3, because I don't care about HD DVD's then theres no point in buying it therefore saving me money instead of making me buy it with the console, like PS3 do. So don't chat shit about being expensive when technically it's still cheaper then PS3 when combined with the price of the premium and it's optional to buy so you don't have to spend an extra £130 if you don't care about HD DVD.
You forgot to add the cost of the MultiMedia card reader/writer in the PS3. My guess is it would cost about £30-40 on it's own. Then there's the 60 Gb SATA Hard Drive. PC World sell 80 GB SATA Hard Drives for £40 so a 60 GB wil probably cost around £25-30.
Then there's the Blu-Ray Drive. Again, PC World sell PATA Blu-Ray drives for £550 and the Blu-Ray DVD Players aren't cheap either. The cheapest costs around £700.
Feel free to check up on those prices by the way.
The reason why there is a Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 is because Sony are desperately trying to protect their games. There has been a lot of Pirate copies of PS1 and PS2 games available over the years and both consoles have been hacked to play those copies.
Sony are hoping that Blu-Ray PS3 games will take a lot effort to crack. Plus the fact that Blu-Ray drives and media are crazily overpriced at the moment, and you can see why it'll be a while before someone starts making copies.
Look at the Xbox 360 as an example. It can easily be hacked by flashing the firmware of the drive and suddenly it'll start to boot up your copied games without the need to chip the console. And remember that DVD Rewriters are widely available and cheap. Double Layer media is still quite expensive at the moment but the point is that it's very easy to crack Xbox 360 games. And it's only happened because of Microsoft's "rush-rush" approach. They chose to base the console around DVD media and now they're going to have to pay the price.
This will probably not effect me. I don't plan on buying a PS3 until 2009/2010 at the earliest. But by then, Sony will have had more than enough time to integrate this feature because remember that the PS2 hardware had several different versions floating about and the slim PS2 did increase the functionality of the DVD Player.
