Sony appears to have blinked first in the current video game console war.

The company that dominated the battle among the PlayStation 2,
Xbox and GameCube announced Monday (July 9) that its current model of
the eight-month-old PlayStation 3 will drop in price from $599 to $499
in North America, effective immediately. Neither Microsoft’s Xbox 360
nor Nintendo’s Wii have dropped in price since the systems’ respective
launches in November 2005 and November 2006.

Sony also announced plans for the August introduction of a new
version of the PS3 that will include an 80-gigabyte hard drive