Sony has taken an interesting approach to the PlayStation, push out the new while still supporting the old. It’s a common practice with software, but not so much with game consoles. For instance, the moment the Xbox 360 was released, the Xbox was practically dropped off the Microsoft radar (much the disgrace of my mum where my family had purchased an Xbox about a year before the 360 came out, only to find that now they cannot buy any peripherals easily).

Yet Sony would tell you that they are sticking to the “10 year plan.” It’s all in the 10 year plan, and we’ve been hearing about the 10 year plan a lot recently especially when Sony announces a price cut and they try to convince everyone that it was in the 10 year plan the whole time.

The PlayStation 2 was released in 2000, so there is still a bit of time left on its 10 year plan. So what do you do? You release a newer, cheaper version. If it is the same as the Japanese one, the differences are less components, even lighter, and the power supply is now inside the PS2 rather than an external brick. It also looks like the external design has changed, with the removal of the grooves on the front and having the PS2 strip on the side of the unit take up the bottom half.

So to get backwards compatibility with your 40gb PlayStation 3, you spend an extra $150 (est.) on this. I guess it has better support

More pictures of the black, white and silver ones at ThreeSpeech.