It seems like these days you can almost always trust the rumor mill. Even Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, has voiced his frustration with his company's inability to keep a secret. The PS3 Slim has been rumored as far back as E3, and it has finally officially arrived. Oh, and it's cheaper too!

The new PS3 Slim is, as you may have discerned, smaller than its predecessor.  It's also now down to $299, a move that the gaming industry has been anticipating for some time.  The design is basically identical to what we've been seeing for the past 3 months in various information leaks, but if you've stayed out of the loop you can see it below.  Although it doesn't look to be as dramatic of a reduction in size as the PS2 Slim version was, it's still considerable.  Note that the smaller size comes with the removal of some meaningful/meaningless features (depending on who you're talking to): it has no PS2 backwards compatibility and no ability to install a secondary operating system.

(Photo courtesy of Veronica Belmont's Flickr feed, you can see the rest of her shots here)

PS3 Slim and original PS3 side-by-side

PS3 Slim and original PS3 side-by-side

Another notable announcement is the feature list for the PS3's 3.0 firmware update.  It's nothing totally revolutionary, but it looks like Sony is working on enhancing the usability of the system.  I really like the new visual flares to the XMB and the community feature listings which let you get easy access to new content both in the PSN Store and elsewhere.  The video detailing the updates is below.