[1] Since then there have been numerous newer consoles—the most recent being the PlayStation 5 released in 2020—while there have also been a series of handheld consoles and a number of other electronics such as a media center[disambiguation needed] and a smartphone.

The company supplied components for other consoles, such as the sound chip for the Super Famicom from Nintendo, and operated a video game studio, Sony Imagesoft.

[8] At the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1991, Sony revealed a Super Famicom with a built-in CD-ROM drive that incorporated Green Book technology or CD-i, called "Play Station" (also known as SNES-CD).

[9] The breaking of the partnership infuriated Sony President Norio Ohga, who responded by appointing Kutaragi with the responsibility of developing the PlayStation project to rival Nintendo.

This proposal was swiftly rejected by Kutaragi who was facing increasing criticism over his work with regard to entering the video game industry from within Sony.

At the meeting, Kutaragi unveiled a proprietary CD-ROM-based system he had been working on which involved playing video games with 3D graphics to the board.

Eventually, after witnessing the success of Sega's Virtua Fighter in Japanese arcades, that Sony realized "the direction of the PlayStation became instantly clear" and 3D polygon graphics became the console's primary focus.

Also in 1993, Phil Harrison, who later became President of SCE Worldwide Studios, was recruited into SCEI to attract developers and publishers to produce games for their new PlayStation platform.

The project eventually hit Japanese stores in December 1994 and gained massive sales due to its lower price point than its competitor, the Sega Saturn.

[35] Among the new applications and services, Sony introduced the PlayStation App, allowing PS4 owners to turn smartphones and tablets into a second screen to enhance gameplay.

[37][38] By incorporating a share button on the new controller and making it possible to view in-game content being streamed live from friends, Sony planned to place more focus on social gameplay as well.

[168] It ships with a minor update to the DualShock 4 controller, with the light bar visible through the top of the touchpad and dark matte grey coloured exterior instead of a partially shiny black.

[170] It is an updated version of the PlayStation 4 with improved hardware, including an upgraded GPU with 4.2 teraflops of processing power, and higher CPU clock.

[41] In early 2019, Sony's financial report for the quarter ending March 31, 2019, affirmed that new next-generation hardware was in development but would ship no earlier than April 2020.

[43] The new console ships with a custom SSD storage, as Cerny emphasized the need for fast loading times and higher bandwidth to make games more immersive, as well as to support the required content streaming from disc for 8K resolution.

PS5 SlimPS5 Slim Digital Edition PS5 Pro PS5 Digital Edition: Digital Content Only PS5 Slim: Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD via detachable disc drive[69] PS5 Pro: Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD via detachable disc drive PS4 and PS4 Slim: 8-Core 1.6 GHz AMD "Jaguar" PS4 Pro: 8-Core 2.1 GHz AMD "Enhanced Jaguar" All models: 8-Core variable frequency (3.5 GHz capped) AMD "Zen 2"[72] Resolution: 256×224 – 640×480 Sprite/BG drawing Adjustable frame buffer No line restriction Unlimited CLUTs (Color Look-Up Tables) 4,000 8×8 pixel sprites with individual scaling and rotation Simultaneous backgrounds (Parallax scrolling) 620,000 polygons/sec Capable of multi-pass rendering; Connected to VU1 on CPU (a vector only for visual style coding things with 3.2 GFLOPS) to deliver enhanced shader graphics and other enhanced graphics PS4 and PS4 Slim: Custom AMD Radeon 18 out of 20 Compute Units enabled (1152 out of 1280 shaders enabled) @ 800 MHz[73] 1.84 TFLOPS PS4 Pro: Custom AMD Radeon, 36 out of 40 Compute Units enabled (2304 out of 2560 shaders enabled) @ 911 MHz[74] 4.19 TFLOPS PS5 and PS5 Slim: Custom AMD RDNA 2 36 out of 40 Compute Units enabled (2304 out of 2560 shaders enabled), variable frequency (2.23 GHz capped), up to 10.28 TFLOPS[72] PS5 Pro: TBA DVD Playback Audio file playback (ATRAC3, AAC, MP3, WAV, WMA) Video file playback (MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264-AVC, DivX) Image editing and slideshows (JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP) Mouse and keyboard support Folding@Home client with visualizations from the RSX DVD playback Audio playback from inserted USB flash drive Ultra HD Blu-ray playback DVD playback The PlayStation Portable (PSP) was Sony's first handheld console to compete with Nintendo's DS console.

The original model (PSP-1000) was released in December 2004 and March 2005,[79] The console is the first to utilize a new proprietary optical storage medium known as Universal Media Disc (UMD), which can store both games and movies.

[87] In 2008, Sony released a second hardware revision called the PSP-3000 which included several features that were not present in the PSP-2000, such as a built-in microphone and upgraded screen, as well as the ability to output PSP games in interlaced mode.

[98] The original model of the handheld, the PCH-1000 series features a 5-inch OLED touchscreen,[99] two analog sticks, a rear touchpad, Sixaxis motion sensing and a 4 core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor.

The new PCH-2000 series system is a lighter redesign of the device that was announced at the SCEJA Press Conference in September 2013 prior to the Tokyo Game Show.

It was released in Japan on October 10, 2013, in six colors: white, black, pink, yellow, blue, and olive green, and in North America on May 6, 2014.

PlayTV is an add-on unit for the PlayStation 3 that allows the PS3 to act as an HDTV or DTV receiver, as well as a digital video recorder (DVR).

The Xperia Play is an Android-powered smartphone with a slide-up gamepad resembling the PSP Go developed by Sony Ericsson aimed at gamers and is the first to be PlayStation Certified.

It features a 5.7-inch 1920×1080 resolution OLED display, and operates at 120 Hz which can eliminate blur and produce a smooth image; the device also has a low latency of less than 18ms.

At CES, Sony presented demos of The Last of Us, God of War: Ascension, Puppeteer and Beyond: Two Souls, playable through PS Now on Bravia TVs and PlayStation Vitas.

[157][158] "Room" (officially spelled as R∞M with capital letters and the infinity symbol in place of the "oo") was being beta tested in Japan from October 2009 to April 2010.

[168] In 2002, Sony released the first useful and fully functioning operating system for a video game console, after the Net Yaroze experiment for the original PlayStation.

The kit, which included an internal hard disk drive and the necessary software tools, turned the PlayStation 2 into a full-fledged computer system running Linux.

Visitors to the website quickly recognized that the domain name was registered to a marketing company, exposing the campaign on sites such as YouTube and digg.

A study by Greenlight's Entertainment Retail has also shown that the PlayStation brand is the most interactive making 634 posts and tweets on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.