The
80Gb PS3, due to launch in Korea this June, may well be heading to the US according to worldwide news aggregator
The Associated Press. All over Google News the headline, “Sony may sell 80-gig Playstation 3 in US” is cropping up from local news sites serviced by the AP.
The basis of this assertion is a comment from Satoshi Fukuoka, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment, who said, "Increasing capacity for models is one of the options. We make such decisions depending on the needs of the market, and every country is different."
We can safely say it's “an option,” then. Another option, of course, would be for Sony to withdraw the PS3 from the market altogether and retreat to the Cayman Islands to play
Steel Harbinger on the PSOne. Doesn't mean it's likely to happen.
By the AP's logic the 80Gb PS3 “may” be coming to the UK, so SPOnG called Sony to find out if it will. “We haven't made plans to bring it over here,” SPOnG was told. “At the moment it's just Korea.”
The AP might have done well to have a look at Sony's comments
yesterday, when a spokesman said “...currently there are no plans to change current hardware offerings [in North America]."
It looks like non-Koreans will have to satisfy themselves with
DIY Hard Drive upgrades to increase their PS3's storage capacity for the time being.