From everything i've heard, the rumors about orbis and durango sound completely disappointing. Orbis is gonna have a normal 6-axis with a touchpad (not even a touchscreen?!)?- sounds completely lame and practically useless. Has the Vita's touchpad on the rear been used for anything more than a couple cheap gimmicks? How in the world is a touchpad going to be as helpful as a touchSCREEN would be, at least with a screen it can show inventory/maps/etc (ie Wii U gamepad). With a touchpad, none of that will be possible, & it will be used for a couple gimmicks, but honestly how far can that actually go? If Sony was smart, they would make it a touchscreen not a touchpad. Next up-Durango will include kinect built-in?- sounds completely unimaginative and boring. Has kinect brought many new worthwhile experiences, besides a couple dance/workout games (which were already somewhat similar to Wii experiences). The main problem with kinect is that you have no buttons or ways to move a character in 3d space, so everything has to be on-rails & you have no ability to fire a gun or anything like that (which especially hurts because microsoft is very FPS heavy). Look at the "hardcore" experiences on kinect, they're utterly miserable. So those are the "innovations" that apparently Micro/Sony will be bringing, both don't seem to add anything very interesting or new to gameplay table. Beyond that, i suppose the graphics will be improved, but it's not going to be a dramatic improvement. The main reason HD gaming looked like such a huge leap graphically, was because our TVs were in the process of transition from SD (640x480) to HD (1920x1080), which really made the games look more spectacular. Yes, the graphics/textures/etc were improved of course, but it was the TVs which really made that difference POP. But now we all have HD tvs and that's not going to be upgraded anytime soon, so whatever graphic improvements will not look as significant. Unless micro/sony pull a rabbit out of the hat & surprise us with something completely unexpected, their next consoles really sound like very minor imporvements that bring nothing particualry interesting or useful to the table. Sure, i could be proven wrong & i'm actually hoping they do prove me wrong, because at this point the rumors sound completely disappointing and underwhelming.

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completely true, it just smells disappoinment right and left

I like the touchpad idea because it allows for better navigation, especially for web browsing and apps. It can also be used for typing. Game concepts are the last thing I really expect from it aside from few physical presses. This is on the front so you know, in case you didn't because some assumed it would be on the back like for Vita.

Essentially the PS4 already has a touchscreen controller, it is the Vita. The touchpad makes me even more confident in saying this as the Vita would be more uniform in navigation because the touchscreen would operate the same way as the touchpad on a DualShock 4. That's not to say you can't navigate with the analogs, they will want to keep the DaulShock 3 compatible too, it will just be much easier to use a touchpad like you would for a laptop.

The PS4 rumours sound damn awesome to me.

• DVR-like recording capabilities for games – the console will be able to record up to 15 minutes of continuous gameplay or take screenshots with a "share" button. Video can be edited and published online from the console.
• Gaikai
• Super fast and efficient OS
• Fuckton of new IPs
• Great specs (6-9x PS360)
• Affordable ($400)

Can't wait to see what else it (and Xbox) will offer.

And seriously, why does it feel like everyone expects "new ways to play" to only come from gimmicky hardware rather than the actual games? 

I don't know if I can take you seriously when your avatar is Pachter "predicting" with his Magical Orb.

you forgot to say Sony will be making a profit day one with it

Why would they put a screen on the controller to make everything expensive? It's a good gimmick and nothing more and the public doesn't seems interested. Give me a lot of horsepower, a good and reliable controller and amazing games, pack it in a cost-effective package and sell it. And looking by the rumours, is exactly what we will got. And it isn't only the HD transition that made everything looks good. HD remakes of old games looks pale compared to current gen ones. Last gen games basically had horrible lightning and looks terrible on big screens. Next gen, tesselation and other new technics will improve graphics considerably (like the frog made with tesselation on Crysis 3 trailler. It was almost real).

Tech demos like Samaritan and Luminous engine just show how we will se an amazing improvement, with lightning (that is a very weak area today and improvements here make games look way better). Take a look at BF3 at maximum settings, the lightning is superb by today's standards. And it is using only 30% of the tech capacity of Frostbite 2. BF4 will probably use close to 80%~100% of it and that will blow every current game out of the water. We are current stuck with sub-par lightning (we can't even do realtime ray-tracing, wich is the only way to achieve complete photorealism) and without a widespread use of DX11-level technics (tesselation is one good example).

And saying that Kinect is "similar" too Wiimote? From a tech standpoint, they aren't even on the same league. Kinect is capable of doing amazing things in computing vision. It can track your entire body effectively. And Kinect 2, maybe, will even be capable of fine tracking (fingers) and emotion detection. I'm not a MS fan, but the technological achievement they made is nothing short of impressive.

They've learned their lesson, the public doesn't care not even a little bit for expensive acessories, they buy what's cheaper and have an acceptable performance. It's all about beeing cost-effective.

1. no one is gonna read that
2. PS4 doesn't need gimmicky controls.
3. PS4 rumors sound awesome: 7970M gpu(18 GCN, 32 ROPs), 8 core cpu and 4GB GDDR5 ram
4. You don't know what you're talking about, our tvs may have been 1080p but our games weren't, that is about to change.