Sony Formally Announces PlayStation 4

At the moment of this writing, Sony’s PlayStation meeting has just begun. Just incase you aren’t watching it live, we wanted to bring the first news released, the system’s name. It probably won’t surprise anyone here, but the official name is PlayStation 4.In fact, as I’m typing this, more news is filtering in…so let’s get to it.

Sony has just showed off the Dual Shock 4, which looks like the leaked images, but with a slight polish to it. It features a share button, a light bar to identify players, a headphone jack, a trackpad, and the usual buttons from a Dual Shock 3. There’s also a stereo camera that will track the controller (very much like the MOVE).

The other big surprise is that the system will have a full 8 GB of unified memory. This was rumored to only be 4 GB over the past few months.

A new game, Knack, was shown from Mark Cerny, who worked on games like Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, and more.

A cool feature of the PS4 allows you to put it to sleep by tapping the power button on the controller. No more needing to load from scratch every time you want to play a game. It takes just a matter of seconds to start playing now. Also games and updates can be downloaded in the background while you play your games.

Dedicated always-on video compression and decompression is built into the hardware. This enables uploading of gameplay right to the site. Sharing of video will be a popular feature. In fact, there will be games that will allow friends to join in and help out a person who’s having problems in the game.

We’ll have more news as it breaks here at Gaming Age, as well as impressions and opinions after the conference is over. Keep checking back for more information!