This week, Sony surprised everyone with exorbitant PlayStation 3 pricing: The base unit will cost a whopping $499, or $200 more than the Xbox 360 Core System. Meanwhile, a higher-end unit will cost—get this—$599, or $200 more than the complete Xbox 360 bundle. For those prices, both units get a Blu-ray optical drive and a motion-sensitive wireless hand controller; the low-end unit gets a 20GB hard disk, and the high-end version upgrades you to a 60GB disk, Memory Stick, Secure Digital (SD) and CompactFlash (CF) inputs, Wi-Fi capabilities, and a single HDMI output. However, Sony is reneging on a number of PlayStation 3 promises: Each unit will include just one Ethernet port, not three as Sony previously announced, and four USB ports, not six. Also, the dual-HDMI output is gone, ending any talk about dual-screen 1080p setups
