Those of you hoping to ditch your old PlayStations when the new one turns up might want to bear the following in mind: early reports suggest that the system maintains the region-coding that governed PS2 and PSone games.
PlayStation 3 is famously region-free, playing PS3 games from any region, but IGN reports that this does not extend to games that are backwards-compatible. We're unable test that theory though, sadly, as our debug unit only plays PS3 software.
The region lock on old games also applies to films, IGN adds.
And for those of you wondering how that compares to the PS3's competitors the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, both are region-locked on old software.