Sony PS4 price set at £349 ($399), and specs revealed

Sony has revealed that the PS4 price will be £349 ($399), some £80 cheaper than its major competitor the Xbox One.

The news will be a massive blow for Microsoft after the company revealed only hours earlier that it intended to charge £429 for its new console.

Further compounding the bad news for Microsoft is that Sony revealed the PlayStation 4 will fully support reuse of games bought on disc, allowing for secondhand games to be sold or lent to friends. In contrast the Xbox One may require online activation and have other restrictions on how users can lend and sell-on their games (it will be somewhat developer/publisher dependent).

Announcing the pricing right at the end of its E3 2013 press conference, the reaction from analysts, commentators and on social media has been immediate and strong, with the majority of opinion about which of the two new consoles will be the favourite having swung massively in favour of Sony, suggesting Microsoft may have to rethink its pricing plans even before launch.

Both consoles will be arriving towards the tail end of the year, with the Xbox One released date confirmed as being in November.

PS4 Specs

The PS4 hardware design was also revealed today, showing the console to sport a similar look to the Xbox One, with flat sides and sharp angles. It was also confirmed that it will have a 500GB hard drive and be region-free.

As for the console's processors the CPU part will utilise eight Jaguar cores while the GPU part will use 18 compute units running at 800MHz, for a total processing power of 1.84 TFLOPS. The final specs of the Xbox One haven't yet been revealed but it is believed its GPU will have 12 processing units running at the same speed. As has long been confirmed, both consoles use chips made by AMD and that incorporate the CPU and GPU onto a single piece of silicon.

• Product name: PlayStation 4 Jet Black
  
• Product code: CUH-1000A series
  
• Recommended retail price: US $399, Canada $399, Europe €399, and UK £349
  
• Main processor: Single-chip custom processor
  
• CPU: x86/64 AMD "Jaguar", eight cores
  
• GPU: 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD next-generation Radeon based graphics engine
  
• Memory: GDDR5 8GB
  
• Storage: 500GB hard disk drive
  
• External dimensions: Approx 275x53x305mm (width x height x length -tentative, excludes largest projection)
  
• Mass: Approx 2.8kg
  
• Optical Drive: BD x6 CAV, DVD x8 CAV (read only)
  
• Input/Output: Super-Speed USB (USB 3.0) port x2, AUX port x1
  
• Networking: Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x1, IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR)
  
• AV Output: HDMI out port, Toslink SPDIF
  
• Included: PlayStation 4 system, wireless controller (Dual Shock) x1, mono headset x1, AC power cord x1, HDMI cable x1, USB cable x1

What are your thoughts on the PS4? Has Sony hit a home run, and is there anyway back for the Xbox One?