Sony has the Leipzig Game Conference pretty much all to themselves as far as press conferences go, so they’ve seized the opportunity and made a bunch of announcements which, if they had come at E3, may have pushed them to at least even with Microsoft in terms of big news coming out of what was supposed to be a major show. At any rate, one of the new tidbits is the reveal of a wireless keypad for the PS3, to be released by the end of the year.

The new keyboard clips into the top of the Sixaxis or Dualshock 3 controller, and features not only a full set of keys but also a touch pad to use for mouse-related input. No price or firm release date has been set for the peripheral, but Sony promises that it will be available in time for the holidays.

The device will surely be helpful to anyone who does a lot of web surfing on the PS3 or sends a fairly large number of messages to friends, but is it going to be worth the price of admission? Sony is saying that the keypad can be used as a new control interface for upcoming PS3 titles, but in what way? Anyone out there looking forward to this, or does it fall in line with most of the Wii peripherals as "interesting concepts that have little to no practical use?"