Sony will next month ship a limited edition "Aqua" PlayStation 2 console. The console will be made available throughout Europe wherever the PAL TV standard is used.

The box will cost £140/€200, and buyers will an eye for the machine's light blue hue will soon afterward be able to snap up matching console stand and 8MB Memory Card accessories.

"We introduced our Silver PlayStation 2 before Christmas," said SCEE president and COO David Reeves. "It proved to be so successful that it was a natural extension to include one other colour to complement the range, and this new Aqua PlayStation 2 seemed just right for Europe in the springtime."

The Aqua and Silver models aren't the only non-black PS2s Sony has offered. Last year, it offered an iMac-like range of brightly coloured consoles. You can still get your hands on blue, red and yellow models, but they'll set you back £280 a pop, and are so rare Sony's

is limiting orders to one per household.

Clearly, just as Steve Jobs has Sony in mind as his model for Apple, so the Japanese giant is keen to 'learn' from the Mac maker's example. Perhaps Apple should port Mac OS X to the PS2, then we could have an Aqua box that runs the Aqua user interface. Getting it to run on the upcoming PowerPC-based Xbox 2 will be more fun, we suspect. And certainly more heavily steeped in irony.

Speaking of Xbox, Sony's move follows a similar announcement earlier this week from Microsoft that it plans to offer a transparent, 'Crystal' limited edition Xbox. ®

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