More confusion. Great.

i just bought a seagate laptop drive and upgraded it myself, its not big deal at all, i can see why they would release a large HD for the play TV, so you can record movies etc , plus the free music downloads in january

I don't understand why Sony don't just go for the extremes and have a 60gb and a 500gb one on the market and people pick based on how they will use it.

Mine would be full several times over if I didn't have a 250gb usb hard drive attached to it but even that is low on space.

The problem I can see happening with this is that 160GB isn't enough in two senses:

1 - if you're the sort of user who wants to put all your music, photos, movies, downloadable games and everything onto your PS3 and use PlayTV, you'd be far better off putting your own 500GB HDD into a base model 40/80GB machine.
2 - if you're mainly interested in gaming, with a bit of downloading extra content from PSN, then 80GB is probably plenty. 160GB - just 80GB more - isn't enough of a difference.

Microsoft made a better job of putting some clear water between their 20GB Pro and 120GB Elite offerings, but now that gap is down to a mere 60GB, everyone's questioning whether the Elite is value for money.

The £40 price difference between the 80 and 160 gig PS3 models is probably close enough that punters will give this new model a go just for the included DLC, but I'm not sure sales of it are necessarily going to be any indication of demand for more capacity.

will this new "improved" PS3 have additional USB ports e.g. usb ports on the back for play tv and extra content on the hardware side of the console? As they stated "new improved" or will it just be a 160gb hdd.

And will it still not play back catalogue? (EG PS2)

This is a great move from Sony who just can't put a foot wrong right now. All that matters to me is how big the hard drive is, no one, myself included cares about actual games any more, and Sony know this. Keep piling up those SKUs!

LOL @7 :D, so true.

After continuously cutting hardware features time after time, they would be better off returning the PS3 to its intended launch state. But then we all know that would have defeated their plan, of deliberately crippling the PS3, to make people buy the new "slimmer than slim" PS2... to play those 120 titles they are still developing.

The only data on my PS3 is the data the games "forced" me to install before I could actually play the damned things. Oh, and a few PSN games which probably take up about 1GB in total.

If I want to view pictures, videos or listen to MP3's, then I simply stream them from my PC, or watch them on my PC. My 20GB 360 drive came close to being full once in all the time I have had it, so my PS3 is safe for years yet.

ps3 sucks balls at da moment they shud hav stuck wiv da 60gb model bcuz it had full backwards compatibilty. only good thing about ps3 is the remote play with psp and thats it