PS3 Slim Could Have Been Smaller, Used Network Storage

The PS3 Slim was a decent attempt at reducing both the size, and the cost, of the original PlayStation 3. But did you know Sony were considering making some more drastic changes?

In an interview with Nikkei, SCE's Masayuki Chatani, from the company's strategy planning department, has revealed that not only were Sony looking at making the Slim even smaller, but that they were looking at some fairly radical solutions to the problems of HDD sizing.

One of those was to use flash memory instead of the conventional HDD the PS3 currently uses, which would have cut down on the size, running costs and even noise levels of the console.

Another was to leave local storage out of the equation altogether, and instead rely on the PlayStation Network to save all of a user's game data, personal files and settings (similar to how Gmail works, for example).

Chatani says Sony "considered both options", but in the end, "felt that the price would be too high for the amount of storage capacity the PS3 needs", so they stuck with a conventional HDD.

He also says, when comparing the Slim with the PS2's redesign - a model that made far more drastic cuts to the dimensions of the console than the Slim has managed - that reducing the size of the PS3 even further was a possibility, but that in order to do so, the machine's power supply would have to have been made external (as it was on the PS2 Slim), which "would have imposed restrictions on transport and use, making it harder to use freely."

Full interview here PS3, PSP Made Smaller, Lighter to Capture New Customer Segments [Nikkei]

An external power supply would look ugly. The current design is fine.

Could this be a sign of things to come next gen? More cloud computing and digital downloads instead of local hardware and solid copies of the games?

I prefer the slim though the way it is. I don't trust the internet enough to save all my music and movies somewhere up there. Especially if I wanted to watch HD movies. And I hate external power bricks.

These ideas just wouldn't work in 2009 imo.

Seems like they made the right decision in the end.

But i think we might see another PS3 Slim in 2011 or 2012... This is not going to be last of it.. n by that time Flash memory maybe cheaper enough n big enough to be considered in PS3 Slim..

these ideas arent too bad givin that you never have to dl anything, but until some major technological advances (network bandwidth being the biggest), these wouldnt have worked out. My current isp offers a maximum of 6mbps line......

i dont think this really is the PS3 slim, that will come maybe 2011? and be close to PS2 size, its a big posibility that Cloud storage will be the norm by PS4, i just feel sorry for anyone without internet or slow internet

That would have been one of the dumbest things ever! Okay for me I game in my bedroom and I can either have my computer OR my PS3 hooked up to the internet at one time, not both. So whenever I'm playing a single player game I don't hook it up to the internet, and this setup would totally fuck people like me over. Oh and when I go to my cottage in the summer I don't have internet at all so I couldn't save games at all? That would be so stupid.

That will be everyone in the UK then, the broadband tecnology needs a update here so we have access to faster speeds like in Japan and in the US.

Don't get me wrong the speed we have is fine if you are dowloading small items, but with the industry possibly making a move to DD, it would take far too long to download the content required for a ps3 game.

So this what the rumored "Playstation Cloud" is huh?
now i know why Sony denied it , it just doesn't work right now atleast.