Sony

In a bid to compete with rival Spotify, Sony has announced it is increasing the quality of its Unlimited Music streaming catalog to 320Kbps.

Spotify has offered 320Kbps streams since 2009 in "high bit rate" mode, while Sony has reportedly offered only a lower 48Kbps stream until now.

Announced at CES 2013, users will be able to utilize the new "high-quality" option on Windows and Mac OS, Android, Sony Android Walkman, and PlayStation 3.

Sony says its catalog of 18 million songs is in the process of being updated to the higher 320Kbps quality.

"It … Read more

Sony is setting the gaming world abuzz with a teaser video promoting "Game Day 2013" on February 1.

The game company yesterday posted a video to its PlayStation-branded YouTube page showing a woman in a dress walking toward the camera as what appears to be ash is falling from the sky. Just before the video's end, an image appears of a yellow eye.

The YouTube video is entitled "Game Day 2013 Teaser" and provides no explanation of what is shown. At the end, it displays the date "February 1, 2013."

Not surprisingly, gamers … Read more

Authorities in Beijing are considering allowing the likes of Sony and Nintendo to once again sell video game consoles in China, according to reports.

Video game consoles such as Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox were banned more than a decade ago over worries that video game playing could corrupt children and hamper their development. But now the China Daily says at least one governmental official believes that there is a possibility for gaming to once again hit the Chinese market.

An anonymous source from the Chinese Ministry of Culture told the publication:

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has been fined 250,000 pounds (US$395,775) by the Information Commissioner's Office in the U.K., following the massive hacking of Sony's PlayStation Network in 2011 that saw million of users' personal data leaked.

The monetary penalty on Sony comes after the "serious breach of the Data Protection Act," the ICO said in a statement today.

When the Sony PlayStation Network Platform was hacked in April 2011, it compromised the personal information of millions of customers, including names, addresses, e-mail addresses, dates of birth, and account passwords. Customers' payment card … Read more

Sony adds to its E-mount lens line for the Alpha NEX series of cameras with a 20mm f2.8 pancake (30mm equivalent) that will ship in April for $349.99. Sony currently only offers one other pancake lens, a 16mm f2.8 (24mm equivalent). From a size standpoint, the pancakes are a nice complement to the skinny NEX bodies, but you'll usually get better image quality --and faster apertures -- out of their not-so-slim counterparts.

Sony also took the opportunity to announce standalone pricing and availability for the 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 power zoom E-mount lens that it unveiled … Read more

The world isn't black and white anymore for the super slim PS3.

Sony's Japanese PlayStation division released information today about several new color options -- Azurite Blue and Garnet Red -- coming soon to the CECH-4000 series PlayStation 3. The reveal follows a German Amazon listing for the same variations that appeared last week.… Read more

Sony's new tablet is really thin. How thin? Thinner than the already-very-svelte iPad Mini.

The 10.1-inch Xperia Tablet Z measures 6.9mm or about 0.27 inches. The uber-thin Mini is 7.2mm and 0.28 inches, by comparison.

Thinness is important in tablets because it translates to very light, easy-to-hold designs. And here Sony delivers too: it weighs in at 485 grams or just over one pound.

That also beats the 10-inch class competition: Apple's iPad 4 is 1.44 pounds.

The 10.1-inch Xperia sports a 1,920x1,200 "Reality Display." That's not quite the pixel density of the iPad 4's Retina display but it's pretty close. The Xperia is about 224 pixels per inch (PPI), while the iPad's 9.7-inch display is 264 PPI.

But, to be fair, both fall short of Google's Nexus 10 with a PPI of 300. … Read more

Move over, mobile payments. NFC is finding other ways to make itself useful.

In fact, paying for items with one's phone seems to be the least common use for the close-range connectivity technology right now, at least based on gadgets unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show. Rather, essentially all products using NFC shown at the recent confab employed the technology in one of two ways: To set up a sort of digital handshake between a mobile device and another gadget or as a way to share information between products with just a tap.

Sony announced today that it is selling its U.S. headquarters building located on Madison Avenue in New York City to a real estate consortium headed by The Chetrit Group. The sale price for the 37-story building is $1.1 billion.

"Given the opportunities and challenges in the current economic and real estate landscape, selling 550 Madison now is a timely and logical strategic move," Sony Corporation of America President Nicole Seligman said in the statement, according to Bloomberg.

The sale of Sony's assets is a longtime coming. The company has struggled over the past few years … Read more