Sony've Shrunk The (PS2) Kit

Sony have showed a smaller, book-sized PlayStation 2 that will go on sale worldwide next month and help the Japanese electronics giant cut costs as video-game consoles continue to drop in price.


The new PS2 next to the old


And in profile

The downsized PlayStation 2, which weighs half of the current model at 32 ounces, will cost $149 in the United States and 149 euros in Europe, the same price as the current model.

The Tokyo-based company said the Japan price will be set by stores, but it is expected to be slightly cheaper than the current price of $180. These prices are about half the prices of the PlayStation 2 when it first went on sale four years ago.

Competition has been heating up recently among the world's video-game makers, especially in pricing.

Nintendo Co., known for its Super Mario games and its rival console called GameCube, and is coming out with a version of its popular Game Boy portable with two screens called Nintendo DS. It will be available on Nov. 21 in North America for $149 and in Japan on Dec. 2.

Software giant Microsoft Corp., a relative latecomer to the game-console market, sells the Xbox. Earlier this year, Sony cut the price of its PlayStation 2 by $30 to $149 following a similar move by Microsoft for the Xbox in March.

Sony Computer Entertainment chief executive Ken Kutaragi said PlayStation 2 sales were still going strong after more than four years, and sales are expected to grow during the key Christmas shopping season.

"The PlayStation has grown into a stable platform," he told reporters at a meeting to discuss PlayStation strategy.

The smaller PlayStation 2 is about a fourth the size of the regular PlayStation 2, but includes all of its functions, such as playing CDs and DVDs. It comes with a built-in Ethernet port for online gaming. The U.S. model will also have an analog modem port for homes without broadband.

The machine, which is an inch thick, down from 3 inches, will hit stores Nov. 1 in North America and Europe, and Nov. 3 in Japan. It uses fewer parts than today's PlayStation 2, which cuts manufacturing costs, Kutaragi said.

Contrary to expectations, Kutaragi did not announce the price of the PlayStation Portable, a handheld going on sale later this year in Japan and next spring overseas.

He said he wants to gauge reaction when it's shown with playable games at the Tokyo Game Show later this week. He said 22 games will be at the event, including "New Ridge Racer" and "Metal Gear Acid." More than 100 games are being planned for the sales date.

The PlayStation Portable, nicknamed PSP, is about the size of a VHS tape and its surface space is mostly made up of a display for high-quality video as well as games.

"You will see the PSP is totally different from mobile devices that have been around up to now," Kutaragi said.

Kutaragi also said the next-generation PlayStation, the successor to the PlayStation 2, whose sales date and other details are still undecided, will use the Blu-ray disc format.

The announcement was not a surprise since Sony is among the chief backers of Blu-ray technology over a competing standard, High Definition DVD, promoted by Toshiba Corp. and NEC Corp., for next-generation digital video.

The PlayStation series is a key part of Sony's business strategy to fuse music and movies with gaming and boost electronics sales. Nearly 74 million PlayStation 2 machines have been sold worldwide, 40 million of them in the United States and nearly 21 million in Japan.

PlayStation 2 is the dominant game system around the world, controlling about 80 percent of the market in Japan and Europe and about 47 percent in the United States, according to Sony.