As part of their continual "smart saving" guides, today Yahoo! Finance republished a poorly worded thus unintentionally hilarious holiday season shopping guide from SmartMoney written by Anne Kadet. Listing electronic items to avoid giving as gifts, the first pick of the litter is the PlayStation 3.
At a time when Sony's reporting a recent increase of sales (440,000 PS3 units sold the week of Thanksgiving), what reasoning is there to avoid the PS3, according to this article? Why, that pesky disposable controller that you keep having to buy new ones of, of course. Wait, what?
This is what it says:
It's all fun and games until the battery dies. Unlike its competitors, which use replaceable AA batteries, the PS3's remote control is glued shut. When the battery goes, Sony customers have to blow $55 on a new controller.
The first image that comes up when I read this is one of someone clueless enough to throw the PS3 controller into the trash every time the battery runs out of juice, which is just priceless. Maybe they need to have a big label that makes it clear that it comes with a USB cable for a reason?
To be fair, Kadet probably hopefully meant "die" as in when the rechargeable battery can no longer hold a charge, but the wording in the paragraph clearly doesn't make that explicit. It's easy to imagine a Mom or Pop not knowing any better, believing the disposable controller scenario to be the case.
By the way, even if that's what the article meant to say, it's still kind of wrong.
You do not, repeat, DO NOT need to buy a new controller just because of a battery problem. Should your controller ever stop charging (which would usually take at least two years of use anyway and should not deter from buying the console), the PS3 manual includes an instruction on how to remove the battery inside. Not that you'd need an instruction manual, since it's ridiculously easy. Get a small screwdriver, unscrew the back, take out the battery, then insert a new one you can buy for as low as $5 online. It is in no way "glued shut."
Now if you don't feel like messing around with that yourself, the controller is still usable when plugged in via USB. When my battery's low, I usually keep a laptop next to me and plug the controller to it with the included USB cable. If you don't have a laptop, spend $3 to get a longer USB cable. Maybe it's a slight hassle (I don't think so, personally) but it's not like the controllers are rendered automatically unusable and you have to buy a new one. That's silly-talk.
And that's our holiday tip.
