Sony has announced the launch of their “Life with PlayStation” service which will give users live global news and weather as well as 3D views of the globe and even cloud imagery.
The information will be provided from partnerships with The Weather Channel (the weather updates), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (cloud imagery), Google News (the news feeds) and finally the The Earth Television Network (live webcam images of cities).
The application is free and Sony R&D head Noam Rimon adds that the entire service is integrated with Folding@home so “this means that while you’re taking a stroll on Life with PlayStation, you’re automatically helping Stanford University to work towards curing diseases such as Alzheimer’s and various types of cancers.”
Sony also adds it plans to add “a wide variety of interactive content and channels” to the service in the future.
To add the service, simply head to the XMB and click on the Folding@home logo.
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According to a report over at Hexus, Microsoft’s proposed major hardware redesign could also include a new name for the console.
Citing the same source that leaked evidence of the Xbox 360 Elite model in advance, a new leaked memo shows that the Xbox 360 revision could be called The Pure. The memo also shows that the revision so far has codenames “Lean” and “Granite” most likely alluding to a thinner case design and a new colorway.
The memo doesn’t show any timetable would would make sense that the name change will come with the upcoming Valhalla chip design. The new chip will move the CPU and GPU into a single chip and will have less power consumption as well as well as make the system cooler. Although there is no official timeframe for the release of the Valhalla revision, many believe Q1 2009 is the time when manufacturing will begin.
Update: It has been brought to my attention by Jab1981 that this rumor was nothing more than a hoax contest by CheapAssGamer and therefore is absolutely not true.
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Memorex has become the first major electronics producer to sell a Blu-ray player at under $300 USD at launch, setting the new milestone with its MVBD-2510 priced at $270 USD.
The player does however lack Profile 2.0 (BD-Live) but for the average user who does not care about the ability to download extras from the Internet, the player is a great deal for the price and Profile 1.1 is fine. The player has HDMI out and support for Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD and raw bitstream audio. It will also play 1080p24p natively without the need for pulldown that degrades quality.
The player is set to ship in November and should be on retail shelves by late November/early December.
