Rui CarmoSony’s third attempt at creating a games console, which they managed to make hopelessly confusing for mere mortals:
Also a classic case of industrial design compromise. The original concept design (below) has pretty much nothing to do with the looks of final devices:
(simplegallery#ps3images)* 
Besides the (increasingly irrelevant) Blu-Ray and DVD formats, the machine supports H.264 AVC and DivX video playback and can act as a “DLNA”:Wikipedia:Digital_Living_Network_Alliance media extender (see UPnP for server software to publish media to it).
The “slim” edition finally came about in August 2009, irrevocably dumping PS2 and Linux compatibility (I couldn’t care less about the latter, but the former stings).
Resources:
| Date | Link | Notes | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | ||||
| Feb 22 | Rivet | Another DLNA streamer a la MediaLink | ||
| 2009 | ||||
| Aug 27 | PlayStation 3 Slim review | Smaller, greener, quieter, upgradeable, nice. | ||
| Aug 26 | PS3 Slim tore down, explored, huge fan revealed | Hopefully quieter than the vacuum cleaner they built into the 60GB edition… | ||
| PlayStation 3 Slim Teardown | |
Apr 18 | AVIAddXSubs | A Windows program to merge/mux .srt subtitles into DivX files without re-encoding. |
| 2005 | ||||
| Oct 27 | PS3 Backward Compatibility Status | US titles | ||
| Oct 27 | Backward Compatibility Status | For PAL, European titles, seems to be on the blink | ||