Play Station 4 Reviews, Specs, Release Date

The PS4 itself was shown off for the first time at E3 and it's black, just like the Xbox One. However, it has an angular design and appears to be constructed of a similar plastic to the original PS3 Slim machine. It looks as though it's slimmer than the Xbox One but we're not totally blown away by the design.

- AMD's technology is coursing through this new system's veins, and Sony recently told us that it believes the PS4 to be the most powerful gaming device every conceived. Sony revealed the system runs on a single-chip custom processor and utilizes eight x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU cores, with a next-gen AMD Radeon based graphics engine powering the way.

- The Highly Enhanced PC GPU is another AMD part - something along the lines of a Radeon 7850 card and packs 18 GCN units. That may sound a like a lot of techy mumbo jumbo but what it essentially means is that the GPU packs 18 processing clusters, each packing up to 64 cores. That provides a lot of parallel processing power, and will thus handle the majority of the PS4's grunt work. It hits 1.84 TFLOPS of processing power, a good chunk more than the Xbox One.

- The PS4 will ship packing 8GB of GDDR5 memory. That's some super-fast stuff right there and should enable lightning fast performance


Play Station 4 - Specification:

• CPU: low power x86-64 AMD "Jaguar", 8 cores
• GPU: 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD Radeon™ Graphics Core Next engine
• Memory: GDDR5 8GB
• Hard Disk Drive: Built-in
• Optical Drive (Read only): BD 6xCAV, DVD 8xCAV
• I/O: Super-Speed USB (USB 3.0), AUX
• Communication: Ethernet, IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth® 2.1 (EDR)
• AV output: HDMI, Analog-AV out, Digital Output (optical)


Joy Stick Specs:
• External Dimensions: Approx. 162mm x 52mm x 98mm
• Weight: Approx. 210gm (tentative)
• Buttons: PS button, SHARE button, OPTIONS button, Directional buttons (Up/Down/Left/Right), Action   buttons (Triangle, Circle, Cross, Square), R1/L1/R2/L2/R3/L3, Right stick, Left stick, Touch Pad Button,  Touch Pad 2 Point Touch Pad, Click Mechanism, Capacitive Type
• Other Features: Light Bar, Vibration, Built-in Mono Speaker
• Ports: USB (Micro B), Extention Port, Stereo Headset Jack
• Wireless communication: Bluetooth® Ver2.1+EDR


Camera Specs:

• External Dimension: Approx. 186mm x 27mm x 27mm
• Weight: Approx. 183gm
• Video Pixel: (Maximum) 1280 x 800 pixel x 2
• Video Frame Rate: 1280x800 pixel @ 60fps, 640x400 pixel @ 120fps, 320x192 pixel @ 240fps
• Video Format: RAW, YUV (uncompressed)
• Lens: Dual Lenses, F value/F2.0 fixed focus
• Field-of-View: 85 degrees
• Microphone: 4 Channel Microphone Array
• Connection Type: PS4 dedicated connector (AUX connector)
• Cable Length: Approx. 2m (tentative)


Price:

Sony announced the PS4 price at E3 - it'll cost $399 in the US, £349 in the UK and €399 in Europe when it goes on sale in November. That's a whole $100 cheaper than the Xbox One.

That price, it must be said, does not include the PlayStation Camera, whereas the Xbox One will ship with the second version of Kinect.


Release Date:

The official PS4 release date was announced at Gamescom 2013. The PS4 will go on sale on 15 Nov 2013 in the U.S., followed by the U.K. on 29 Nov 2013. Australia will also see the console then, while Canada too shares the U.S.'s 15 Nov 2013 launch date.