Sony at CES 2014: PlayStation Now, Xperia Z1 Compact, and futuristic interfaces – The Verge

Sony returns to the swagger of its glory days

2014-01-10T08:01:00-05:00

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During the 1990s, Sony was the world's preeminent tech brand, dominating the field with its innovative designs and consistently superior products, but the past decade hasn't been so great.

The Japanese company lost its crown to Apple through a series of calamitous decisions and strategies that were more outlandish than forward thinking. So when Kazuo Hirai took over the mantle of CEO in 2012, his first task was merely to steady the ship. Two years on, however, Kaz is done patching up holes and making apologies, and Sony appears ready to lead from the front once more.

The aspirational Sony is back

Under Hirai's leadership, the trajectory of …

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PlayStation Now will require a DualShock controller for TVs, tablets, and phones

2014-01-09T08:01:00-05:00

PlayStation Now

PlayStation Now could be the future of gaming, but you're going to need a proprietary controller to play. Though Sony has announced that the streaming game service will come to tablets and smartphones - perhaps even non-Sony devices - the company doesn't plan to let you use a touchscreen. To play PS3 games, PlayStation marketing VP John Koller tells us, you need to have the gamepad they were originally designed for. "You need to have the DualShock to be able to play," says Koller.

Sony tells us a DualShock 4 will do for the PlayStation 4, and the PlayStation Vita handheld buttons can continue to work the same way they do now. Sony's new Bra …

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Sony’s XSP-N1BT turns your smartphone into an in-car entertainment system

2014-01-08T08:18:01-05:00

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Sony has shown off its new XSP-N1BT smartphone cradle receiver at CES. The device sits in your car's dashboard, where it uses your smartphone to interface with your vehicle's audio system, becoming a head-unit that can play music, stream internet radio, and make hands-free calls. The cradle replaces your smartphone's native interface, replacing it with Sony's App Remote 2 when connected. App Remote 2 might not look as stylish as other smartphone interfaces, but it does offer voice control, allowing users to "hear and compose text messages and emails, obtain mapping information, and listen to notifications" without needing to move their hands …

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Sony CEO Kaz Hirai says cloud TV won’t compete with cable, 4K adoption could take seven years

2014-01-07T16:00:52-05:00

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At a sit-down with Sony CEO Kaz Hirai, the company head spoke on the new products and services announced at CES 2014, some of which were just introduced today. One of the more interesting developments on center stage was the announcement of a new streaming cloud TV service that could be Sony's first real initiative to take on the living room in a cohesive manner.

Hirai was tight-lipped when discussing the service's features or Sony's partnerships, but he was quick to defend against the notion that Sony's cloud TV would be running up against cable providers. "We're not trying to compete with the cable operators - we're trying to resolve one …

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Up close with Sony’s futuristic Life Space UX projector

2014-01-07T15:09:00-05:00

Gallery Photo: Demonstration of Sony's Life Space UX projector

Sony unveiled Life Space UX, its wildly ambitious vision for future home displays, onstage at CES earlier today. In a tiny room in a tucked-away corner of their booth, we got a closer look at the interface - and we came away impressed.

Sony's demonstration was set in a mocked-up living room of the near future. There was nothing terribly futuristic about the setting, which was surely the point; Sony intends for each display to live seamlessly on the surfaces we normally interact with on a regular basis. Projectors concealed strategically in the room displayed a number of concepts, like a skylight showing a spring day. At the kitchen table, a …

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PlayStation Now hands-on: you’ll never think of gaming the same way again

2014-01-07T13:44:10-05:00

PlayStation Now

Sony has finally spilled the details on its Gaikai-powered streaming service PlayStation Now, and we wasted no time in giving it a try. PlayStation Now lets owners of Sony hardware (including PS4, PS3, Vita, and Bravia TVs) stream some of the company's greatest games - all from the cloud. The demo at Sony's CES show booth features four titles, including The Last of Us, God of War: Ascension, Beyond: Two Souls, and Puppeteer, all running on a Bravia HDTV, and all running without a PlayStation 3 anywhere in sight. For our demo, we first booted up God of War. The game's loading time left a bit to be desired, but once it was running, things went …

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Life Space UX: Sony unveils its wild idea for the future of interfaces

2014-01-07T13:01:43-05:00

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At CES 2014 in Las Vegas, Sony's Kaz Hirai just announced an ambitious new interface concept - Life Space UX. The idea is to merge your home and technology into a seamless experience. "The conventional boundaries are being transformed, if not vanishing altogether," said Hirai. In a demonstration, Hirai showed off windows doubling as screens and vice versa. "Imagine being an avid surfer and having the perfect wall-sized window to see the world's most vivid surf spots in real time on your television," he explained.

"These objects must be fantastic objects of sensation that engage all of our senses."

It wasn't all just a futuristic concept, how …

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Sony announces cloud-based TV service with live TV, DVR, and video on demand

2014-01-07T12:53:02-05:00

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We were expecting Sony to launch something like PlayStation Now, which is cloud-based streaming for games. But Sony seems to have larger ambitions, launching a TV service that will provide live television, video on demand, and even DVR in the cloud. It will offer universal search "across live and on-demand video content" - letting you just keep your content in Sony's cloud and use it across all of your Sony gadgets - in fact, the company says it will work on 70 million Sony devices. That presumably includes the PS4, PS3, Vita, smart TVs, and Android devices. It's not clear at all what Sony means by "live TV" yet - building an all-in-one ser …

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Sony has sold 4.2 million PlayStation 4s

2014-01-07T12:48:39-05:00

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Yesterday Microsoft announced that it had sold 3 million Xbox Ones as of the end of 2013, and today Sony has revealed an even bigger number - as of December 28th the PlayStation 4 has sold 4.2 million units. The news was announced by Sony's Andrew House at today's CES 2014 press conference in Las Vegas, and it's double the number we last heard, when Sony revealed that it had sold 2.1 million units as of December 3rd. Of course, Sony had a brief head start, which may account for the higher sales numbers - the PS4 launched on November 15th, whereas the latest Xbox hit store shelves one week later.

According to a Sony press release, those cons …

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Sony announces PlayStation Now, its cloud gaming service for TVs, consoles, and phones

2014-01-07T12:43:00-05:00

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The PlayStation 4 may not be the most important part of Sony's gaming strategy anymore. At CES 2014, Sony has just announced PlayStation Now, a service that will bring streaming PlayStation games not only to PS4, but also PS3, PlayStation Vita, and even televisions, tablets, and smartphones.

It's the company's public-facing brand for Gaikai, the cloud gaming technology it purchased in June of 2012, which the company previously said would bring PS3 games to the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita later this year. Sony says the technology is already working here at CES, with attendees able to try critically acclaimed action title The Last of U …

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