Sony has confirmed the new PlayStation 3 (PS3) console will launch simultaneously worldwide in November of 2006.

At a Tokyo game developers conference, Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi said the console would launch within the first ten days of November. Reasons for the delay weren't given, but he did discuss delays in finalizing the specification of the Blu-ray drive.

Kutaragi hinted Sony expects to have a production capacity of one million units a month by November, and to ship six million units by the end of March 2007 (with maybe half of those in 2006).

While November is a big delay to the previously announced launch date of spring (assumed just for Japan), the U.S. is largely within expectations, and a November date for Europe is actually much earlier than assumed.

Kutaragi also briefly discussed plans for an Xbox Live style online service (currently called the "PlayStation Network Platform"; *yawn*). The possibly free service may include matchmaking, messaging, rankings, friends lists, voice and video chat, in-game shopping and game downloads. Publishers can connect their own servers (kind of like LucasArts and Electronic Arts with Xbox Live), but Sony Online Entertainment will provide the hardware infrastructure, and GameSpy will provide middleware tools and software. Probably a smart "buy; don't build" decision on Sony's part

Not much discussion on the PS3's hardware, other than its use of a 60GB hard drive pre-installed with Linux, which will apparently be mandatory for playing games. However, reports say Kutaragi indicated Sony had not yet decided whether the drive would be shipped with the console. Uh, "mandatory for playing games", but "[may not be] shipped with the console"?

Kutaragi re-confirmed backwards compatibility with PSone and PlayStation 2 titles (at higher resolutions, akin to what the Xbox 360 does), and said all PS3 games would be pressed on Blu-ray discs.

Final controllers and development kits will supposedly be sent to developers by May (maybe in time for E3?), and this would be better lead time than Microsoft gave developers for the 360 (where August/September dev kits were available for a November release).

On the PlayStation Portable front, Sony Announced a US PSP price cut, from $249 to $199, but the cheaper bundle may not include the 32MB Memory Stick Duo, soft case, remote control or headphones.

Heading off Nintendo's "Revolution"-ary ability (*groan*) to download and play classic first-party titles, Sony announced an "E-Distribution" emulator for the PSone, where users can download original 32-bit era PlayStation games and play them on the PSP. No further details were given on the service, launch, or how games would be adapted to play with one analogue controller. More telling to me is current PSP bundles only come with a 32 megabyte memory card, so the download service, along with price reductions on the current hardware, maybe hints at a new version of the PSP on its way (just like Nintendo did recently with the Nintendo DS price reduction and incentive bundles) -- possibly with a larger capacity storage device for the portable.

Sony announced support for video voice over IP (VVOIP), available in October via a webcam peripheral which Kutaragi described as an EyeToy – though it might not be used to play games.

Kutaragi also confirmed rumors of PSP Web browser support for Macromedia Flash games and RSS feeds. Finally, he said their would be support for global positioning satellite (GPS) functionality (kind of like the sadly defunct Gizmondo), although no timeline was given for any these additions.