Sony said that it will release a new motion controller for the PlayStation 3 video game console by mid next year during spring.

The controller which Sony unveiled in June, will work with the existing PlayStation Eye camera, which can track players’ voices, faces and body motion. The controller, in turn, has on its end a light-emitting sphere that can be recognized by the PlayStation Eye camera.

Motion controllers were popularized by Nintendo Co.’s Wii when the console launched in 2006. It allows people play video games without complex buttons and levers.

The announcement came in after Nintendo’s decision to cut the price of the Wii by $50, to $200 beginning early this week.

However no prcing details and was announced for the new motion controller . We wonder how long would it take to reach Malaysia?

The new VAIO W will be available in mid-August for $499 in U.S. This mini netbook will be available in berry pink, cocoa brown and sugar white colors.

Sony VAIO W netbook features 10.1-inch wide-screen display supports 1366×768 pixel resolution. This netbook features 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280 processor that has 2 Watts of Thermal Design Rating. With 1GB RAM and 160GB HDD for storage, this netbook will run Windows XP.

Other features include support for 802.11 b/g/n wireless standards, VGA out, two USB port, Webcam and memory card reader. The three cell battery is expected to last three hours and an option for six cell battery is available.

Sony said Thursday its net profit plunged 95 percent in the October-December quarter, as the holiday shopping season provided no respite for the struggling electronics giant and tepid sales of TVs, digital cameras and cell phones hit its bottom line.

The Japanese manufacturing icon said its usually dependable electronics division posted its first-ever operating loss in the fiscal third quarter. It also reiterated its forecast for a net loss of 150 billion yen ($1.67 billion) for the full fiscal year through March — its first loss in 14 years.

“From the second half of September last year, there has been a sudden deterioration in the economy, and with the effects of foreign exchange it has had severe consequences on our business,” Chief Financial Officer Nobuyuki Oneda said.

Sony Corp. said its net profit shriveled to 10.4 billion yen ($115.6 million) in the third quarter from 200.2 billion yen a year earlier. Revenue fell 25 percent to 2.15 trillion yen from 2.86 trillion yen.

The quarter includes the year’s peak shopping season and is usually a big one for its core electronics division, which generates over half of its total revenues with well-known products like Bravia TVs, Cyber-shot digital cameras and Vaio computers.

But sales of such products fell nearly across the board as consumers held back, and Sony’s electronics division posted an operating loss of 15.9 billion yen, versus a 200.6 billion yen profit a year earlier.

The company has repeatedly warned of its troubled finances over the past few weeks, and the dismal numbers were in line with analysts’ forecasts. But many said the weakness in electronics was a troubling sign, as the division has long been a source of steady profits, even as other areas struggled.

David Gibson, an analyst at Macquarie in Tokyo, pointed to a buildup in Sony’s inventories as it failed to move its products.

“TVs really dragged them down during the period,” he said.

The poor showing in electronics caused Sony’s operating profit, which is generally seen as the best indication of a company’s pure business performance but excludes taxes and other items, to fall to a 18 billion yen loss during the quarter.

Sony generates nearly 80 percent of its sales abroad, making it vulnerable to a strong yen, which cuts into its profits from overseas. The dollar has hovered near 90 yen in recent months after rising as high as 117 yen last year. So far this fiscal year foreign exchange movements have taken about 216 billion yen from Sony’s operating income, the company said.

News from other big Japanese electronics exporters Thursday was also disappointing. Toshiba Corp. said it sank into the red in the third quarter and expects a loss for the full year, while game maker Nintendo Co.’s quarterly net profit fell 18 percent on the strong yen, forcing the company to reduce its full-year forecast.

Last week, Sony projected a 150 billion yen net loss for the full fiscal year, a reversal from a net profit of 369.4 billion yen last year. The last — and only — time Sony reported a loss, for the fiscal year ending March 1995, the red ink came from one-time losses in its movie division, marred by box office flops and lax cost controls.

Tokyo-based Sony has announced some restructuring measures, including cutting 8,000 of its 185,000 jobs around the world and shuttering five or six plants — about 10 percent of its 57 factories.

But Chief Executive Howard Stringer told reporters last week that he had not gone far enough with cut costs and would work harder to combine the company’s diverse businesses, which also include its movie division and PlayStation game console business.

Sony also said that due to the poor economic conditions, it would postpone by a year establishing a joint venture with Sharp to make liquid crystal display panels for thin-screen TVs, and now aims to do so by March 2010.

The company’s stock rose 4 percent Thursday to 1,909 yen. The results were announced after trading closed.-AP

The Japanese consumer electronics giant, the Sony Corporation, said Tuesday that it would eliminate 8,000 jobs and rein in planned investment as it reacts to the global economic slowdown.

Sony, which had already announced scattered cost-savings measures, blamed the rapid deterioration in the global economic outlook and the strength of the Japanese currency for the cuts.

“These initiatives are in response to the sudden and rapid changes in the global economic environment,” Sony, which has 160,000 employees, said in a statement. Sony aims save more than 100 billion yen, or $1.1 billion, a year through the measures, which also include shutting several plants.

About 10 percent of the company’s 57 plants will be shut, including 2 overseas sites, and plans to expand a site in Slovakia where LCD televisions for the European market are assembled have been delayed. The statement did specify which plants will be closed.

Sony will also trim spending in semiconductors and will outsource a part of the production it had planned for image sensors for cellphones.

“Based on such measures, Sony is planning to reduce investment in the electronics business by approximately 30 percent” in the fiscal year ending March 2010, the company said.

The announcements highlight the extent of the pain many Asian exporters — especially in Japan — are facing as the global financial crisis deepens. Like other Japanese manufacturers, Sony has suffered from slowing consumer demand, aggravated by the yen’s rally against the dollar and the euro in recent months, which makes Japanese goods more expensive for consumers in the United States and Europe.

The Japanese domestic market also is faring badly, with Japan last quarter slipping into recession, and no sign of an upturn before the second half of next year at the earliest. Reports released on Tuesday indicated that Japan’s economy sank deeper into recession in the third quarter than initially estimated.

Japan’s export-driven economy contracted 0.5 percent in July-September, far more than the preliminary figure of a 0.1 percent decrease, revised gross domestic product figures indicated.

Sony’s earnings — like those of many of the region’s export giants like Canon, Samsung and Honda — have plummeted as a result of the slowing export and forced the company to cut its annual profit forecast for the fiscal year through March 2009 by 58 percent in October.

The announcement was made after the Tokyo market closed and Sony shares closed up 3.9 percent.

January

• Internet access and international telephone calls throughout Malaysia and most of Asia were disrupted for weeks due to an earthquake in Taiwan that damaged the underwater Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 link. Everything returned to normal in February after repairs by ship were completed.

• TIME Engineering Bhd signed an agreement with MSC Management Services, a subsidiary of Multimedia Development Corporation, to provide wireless broadband nationwide via WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) and WiFi.

• Malaysia won an award for its eBario Project, which provides information and communications technology to an isolated community in Sarawak. The 2006 International Innovations Gold Award came from a Canada-based non-profit organisation, the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management.

• The Recording Industry Association of Malaysia moved to stamp out illegal “over-the- counter” sales of song downloads to mobile phones.

• The Multimedia Development Corporation announced that the pilot of the animated series Saladin was ready to be screened.

• A new music download site, www.bimbit.com, was launched. It allows users to buy music using a points system instead of a credit card.

• PC maker Dell Inc announced it was building an 18,600sq m global business centre in Cyberjaya, which will be operational by year end.

• e-Commerce spending in Malaysia grew 70% in 2006 from previous years, announced industry researcher IDC.

February

• After five years of development and several missed deadlines, Microsoft Corp’s Vista operating system was finally launched.

• Trials of Maxis Telecommunications Bhd’s WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) service, with communications infrastructure provider Motorola Inc, began.

• More than 300,000 underprivileged women benefited from the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Grant. The funding is used to train women in the use of information technology to better their lives and livelihood.

• Four local outsourcing companies did the nation proud. They were among 100 global companies selected for the 2007 Global Service 100 list. They were Consulting Asia Pacific Sdn Bhd, Scicom (MSC) Bhd, SnT Global Sdn Bhd, and Vsource Asia Sdn Bhd.

• Despite considerable progress in combating piracy, the International Intellectual Property Alliance recommended that Malaysia remain on the US Trade Representative’s piracy watch list. It has been on this less criticial list since 2001.

• MDeC and Mimos signed another MoU, this time with the Islamic Development Bank for the provision of information and communications technology solutions to member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Conference.

• Malaysia’s first blog advertising network was launched. Nuffnang was introduced.

March

• Advertlets, Malaysia’s second blog advertising network was launched.

• A couple of RFID (radio frequency identification) technology companies in the country announced that the just-launched Malaysian Microchip has the potential give the industry a boost.

• The Motion Picture Association (MPA) strengthened its efforts against movie piracy in the country by coming down harder on websites that hawk pirated DVDs on the global market.

• The Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs flew in two specially-trained labrador retrievers to sniff out mailed packages for optical discs – a move to better combat the smuggling of pirated movies, music and software. The initiative was a huge success.

April

• Standards body Sirim Bhd ended a battle between IBM Malaysia and Microsoft Malaysia over competing technologies – the open-source based Open Document Format versus OpenXML, a proprietary solution owned by the software giant.

• A delegation of 27 Malaysian companies from the creative multimedia sector secured RM93mil worth of deals in Hong Kong.

• Applied research and development organisation Mimos Bhd agreed to establish research laboratories with organisations in Taiwan and South Korea.

May

• Telekom Malaysia Bhd and 16 other telecommunications companies in the region signed an agreement to build a US$500mil (RM1.75bil) undersea fibre-optic cable linking Asia to the United States. Called the Asia-American Gateway, it is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2008.

• DELL Inc agreed to work with Microsoft Corp and Novell Inc under an alliance that the rival software developers formed last year, to make it easier for the Windows operating system and the increasingly popular Linux operating system to work together.

• The Government establishes the intellectual property court to specially deal with cases involving music, software and movie piracy.

• Industry regulator the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission announced a plan to create a database of lost handphones, to aid the recovery of such devices and to discourage cellphone thieves.

July

• Popular computer game Tomb Raider, starring heroine Lara Croft, celebrated its 10th anniversary. To mark the occasion, developer Crystal Dynamics released Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which pleased local fans of the game.

• Standards body Sirim Bhd was handed the new task of helping local universities to research and develop products or services that could be marketed internationally.

• DELL Malaysia unveiled a range of colourful notebooks in a bid to take back its lead from rival Hewlett-Packard Co.

• An upgraded PlayStation3 console, with a bigger (80GB) hard drive for storing more videogames and high-definition movies, showed up in local stores.

• Alam Teknokrat founder and chief executive officer Tengku Farith Rithaudeen unveils his book about how to be successful in the local IT market.

• Microsoft Malaysia unleashes a new server operating system, Windows Server 2008.

• The Government revised the household broadband penetration target from 75% by 2010 to 50% by the same year.

August

• The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) and India’s Satyam Computer Services Ltd launched Campus Link, a programme to turn local graduates in knowledge workers.

• Malaysian Skype users were among the 220 million worldwide that experienced a breakdown in the popular and free Internet-based phone service. Skype said the failure was not due to any malicious activity.

• MDeC upped its efforts to develop the local creative content industry by holding the first buyer fly-in programme in the country. About RM385mil worth of content was sold.

• The Halal Industry Development Corp teamed up with Microsoft Malaysia to come up with an online halal certification and processing application service called Remote Halal Certification.

September

• Nokia launched its Ovi digital media portal, which includes the Nokia Music Store – a virtual music shop offering downloadable tracks.

• Registration for the World Congress on Information Technology 2008, which will be hosted by Malaysia in May 2008, was opened.

October

• Sony put its 12-megapixel Alpha 700 DSLR camera on local shelves, marking its second foray into the DSLR camera market.

• Local Macintosh fans get Apple’s OS X Leopard operating system, which boasted more than 300 new features.

• MDeC announced a plan to build a Cyberjaya training facility to train local graduates to work in the information technology industry.

November

• The Entertainment Software Association launched “Operation Games Attack” to eradicate videogame piracy in Malaysia.

• Asus’ Eee PC ultra-portable notebook, weighing less than 1kg and features a 4GB solid state drive, WiFi connectivity and integrated card reader, makes an impact on local computer users. Stores reported that the first batch of 200 units sold out quickly.

• Google offers US$10mil (RM35mil) in prizes for developers worldwide to build software for its mobile phone operating system, Android.

• MakCik PC introduced. Claimed as the world’s slimmest PC.

• Third blog advertising network was launched—-GradMyAds

December

• The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit launched two new products – MyMeeting and MyWorkspace – at the Malaysian Government Open-Source Software Conference 2007. Both applications were designed as office productivity tools.

• Fourth advertising network was launched. Called Nufflets, it targets the Asia market and it is the first to use CPC text ads similar to Goolge in Malaysia.

Other source

U.S. sales of video game hardware and software jumped 75 percent in September, driven by Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) “Halo 3″ and Nintendo Co Ltd’s (7974.OS) Wii console.

Total sales in September, a 5-week retail period, soared to $1.36 billion, up from $779 million a year earlier, according to market research firm NPD.

“Halo 3,” the latest installment of Microsoft’s flagship franchise, sold 3.3 million copies, more than twice as many as the next nine games combined, the data showed.

The game received such positive buzz that it spurred consumers to buy Xbox 360s just to play it. Microsoft sold nearly 528,000 of the consoles in September.

“True to it’s name, the game rubbed off on hardware sales too — the Xbox 360 realized its best month ever in unit hardware sales outside last holiday season,” NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in a statement.

Microsoft said “Halo 3″ set the stage for a steady flow of highly anticipated games through the holidays.

“People keep asking me, is it all about ‘Halo’? It’s about the games. We’ve got a great lineup of games and it just keeps coming. A game of a month of system-sellers isn’t going to hurt our business,” said Microsoft spokesman David Dennis.

The “Halo” effect did not dim enthusiasm for Nintendo’s Wii, which sold 501,000 units, the most since last December.

The Wii has been the best-selling console this year, thanks to its low price and ability to appeal to gamers outside the traditional young male audience.

“The Wii went up against the self-proclaimed ‘biggest entertainment launch ever’ and we emerged with our best month of the year,” Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of American, told Reuters.

“They fired their bullet and our gun is loaded and ready to fire throughout the holidays,” Fils-Aime said.

Nintendo’s “Wii Play,” which is bundled with an extra Wii controller, was the number two title, selling 282,000 copies.

Sony Corp’s (6758.T) PlayStation 3 continued to languish in third place with sales of 119,000 units. With a price tag of up to $600, the PS3 is the priciest of the new consoles due partly to its inclusion of a high-definition Blu-ray DVD player.

The company said it would introduce a new PS3 model for $400 and drop the price of the high-end version to $500.

“Next month, with the PS3 price reduction, we should see a notable increase in sales of that platform,” Frazier said.

Sony’s “Heavenly Sword” was number 10 on the list of top-sellers, moving 139,000 copies.

Electronic Arts (ERTS.O), the world’s biggest games publisher, had three games in the top 10, led by the PlayStation 2 version of “Madden NFL 08″ at fourth place with 205,000 copies.-Reuters

Today Sony announced the Sony BWU-200S – a new blu-ray disc writer that is capable of writing blu-ray discs twice as fast as last years generation. The writer will be available in November for around $600.

Press release from Sony:

Sony Unveils 4X Blu-ray Disc Writer Drive

Cuts Burning Time in Half from Previous Model

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 9 — Sony Electronics today announced its second generation internal Blu-ray Disc(TM) (BD) writer drive for the computer aftermarket, which boasts 4X BD-R and 16X DVD+R recording speeds.

The new BWU-200S model cuts BD-R burning time by half compared to the first generation model, allowing for a full 50GB BD-R disc to be recorded in about 45 minutes. It also features improved DVD burning speeds, making it a multi-format combo burner that eliminates the need for more than one drive in a system.

The drive comes with CyberLink BD Solution software that provides a comprehensive application for capturing, authoring, editing, burning and viewing high-definition personal content captured in the native HDV 1080i format from an HDV camcorder. In addition, the software supports recording on DVDs and CDs, as well as playback of DVDs recorded in the AVCHD format.

The BWU-200S drive can record up to 50GB of data for random access storage and backup on BD-R (write once) or BD-RE (rewritable) discs, or up to 230 minutes of high-definition HDV 1080i video on a BD-R/RE 50GB disc. It also supports recording on standard single layer 4.7GB DVD+R/+RW/RAM discs, 8.5GB DVD+R double/dual layer discs, and CDs.

The internal drive features a Serial ATA (SATA) interface and standard 5.25-inch form-factor for easy installation inside a desktop PC with Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP or Windows Vista(R) software.

“Consumers and professional videographers alike can enjoy the huge storage capacity to record and experience high-definition video with our Blu-ray Disc drive,” said Bob DeMoulin, marketing manager for branded storage products in Sony Electronics’ IT Products Division.

The new drive is supported by Adobe(R) Encore(R) CS3 that now comes bundled with Adobe Premiere(R) Pro CS3 software, providing video production professionals with another option for outputting high-definition video on a Blu-ray Disc with MPEG-2 or H.264 compression.

“Advanced optical storage technologies, such as Blu-ray Disc technology with its vast capacity compared to DVD technology, will be key enablers for next generation PC applications like HD personal video content and high- definition TV recording,” said Wolfgang Schlichting, research director for removable storage at IDC. “Sony’s many innovations in optical storage have prepared the company to be a leader in the Blu-ray Disc writable market.”

Availability and Pricing
The BWU-200S drive will be available next month for about $600.