E3 Notebook: Brave New Open World

As of January, that's Live Anywhere.

As for the rest of the vision -- the instant messaging, the game customization, playing online multiplayer games from your cell phone -- well, that will come at least "months" later, according to Holmdahl. And no word yet from Microsoft on what any of this is going to cost.

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But Microsoft wasn't the only company that left out a few niggling details from its vision of the future. In its own presentation on Monday, Sony announced that it will be offering two versions of its upcoming PlayStation 3 platform. At least according to the presentation, the only difference between the two versions will be the size of the hard drive included with them: the cheaper version will have a 20GB drive, the pricier one a 60GB drive.

As you might expect, there are a few more differences. In addition to the bigger hard drive, the top-of-the-line PlayStation 3 will have a memory card reader into which owners will be able to plug memory sticks, SD cards and compact flash cards. It will also have a built-in wireless Ethernet antenna, allowing users to connect to the Internet and online services without having to run a cable from their routers. And it will have an HDMI connector -- a cable connector necessary to link the box with high-definition televisions.

The cheaper PlayStation 3 will have none of those things. Meaning that while Sony is touting that it will be offering the only "true" high-definition game console, that's going to be the case only if you buy the more expensive version.

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