Despite rumors that the recently ended conflict between Immersion and Sony resulted in the long expected addition of rumble technology to PS3’s analog controllers, the Japanese electronics and entertainment behemoth denied having sent such modified controllers to the devs.

However, Sony did admit that “enhanced” SIXAXIS controllers have been sent to the development community.

Sony’s director of communications David Karraker said: "We have not added rumble [to PS3], and have no announcements regarding this feature."

"From time to time, we make minor enhancements to the controllers for our platforms," he said. "We recently sent out to the development community some new prototypes that have a slightly enhanced sensitivity for the analog sticks and the motion sensing within the Sixaxis controller.

"This is not a new controller, but is part of the normal development and evolution of controllers," he added.

Karraker declined to offer more details about the new SIXAXIS controllers.

One of the main reasons for which Sony did not include rumble features into the SIXAXIS controllers for PlayStation 3 is the patent lawsuit filed by Immersion, which owns the intellectual property over some key aspects of the technology integrated in PS2’s DualShock controllers.

Last year, before E3 2006 and long before the launch of PlayStation 3, Sony had declared that it would be technically impossible to include the “haptic” (rumble) features invented by Immersion and the tilting/motion sensing features for which Sony owns the patents into the same SIXAXIS wireless controller.

Phil Harrison, UK corporate executive and a representative director of Sony Computer Entertainment, also considered the rumble technology too “retro” to fit in the company’s strategy for the PS3: "I think [rumble] was a last generation feature; it's not a next-generation feature."

Microsoft was also involved in a legal battle with Immersion over the pesky haptic features and had to pay $26 million to be able to include them in the Xbox controllers. However, a clause in the MS-Immersion deal stipulates that if Immersion settled their legal matters with Sony, then Microsoft stood to receive money from Immersion.