Console Review: Sony PlayStation 3

Last week I traded in some of my games and systems and walked out of the local GameStop with a new PS3. It was a risky venture, especially since I traded in my Wii and my 360 to do it. Madness, you might say, and you d likely be right.

I ve hardly touched either since January, however; I don t feel I ve lost that much. I have a Mac and thus couldn t tap into much of the 360 s functionality beyond streaming music and pictures (and that required purchasing a program called ).
I m not that much of a gamer.

I often pick up the major games, I don t like first person shooters, sports games or car games at all (except on very rare occasions - with particularly brilliant implementations). Right now, for instance, I have Marvel Heroes, God of War II, Resident Evil 4, and Shadow of the Colossus. So, what I look for in a gaming platform is a good selection of games in general but more importantly, I m looking for media center options.

I want to live my digital lifestyle and use all my digital movies, music, etc on my HDTV.
So, I purchased the PS3 as a bit of an impulse buy - I haven t been following it too much because the price more or less completely cut me off from planning on buying it anytime soon, and Sony s astonishing arrogance over the past year or so about it all irritated me somewhat. But, the Xbox Elite being released irritated me somewhat as well (given that it had many of the features it should have had to begin with) and GameStop was offering extra trade-in money for the 360.

Also, I had heard that Sony was touting the PS3 as a media center, the hub of a media home, etc.
I was quite surprised, you ll understand, to find out it didn t really do anything terribly exciting. The PS3 suffers from a massive failure of vision.

It is a pretty black box with enormous untapped potential, but all that potential doesn t change that it is, indeed, untapped. So, let s break it down.

• Blu-ray DVD Player - this is nice, don t get me wrong.

  I picked up The Fifth Element and Kingdom of Heaven - but there really isn t a whole lot out there right now. It s not Sony s fault, but it must be considered.

• Web Browser - The browser is pathetic.

  I won t say it s as bad as the Wii s, but it is still pretty awful and Sony should be ashamed it ever was released in the state it is in. It frequently fails to load a page without multiple attempts, its zoom and scaling levels are very extreme, and you really just never know what will work and what won t. The upside is some, rather surprising, sites do work.

  Such as , , and . None of these work well, mind you, but they do work. Pandora would work, I imagine, except the flash implementation doesn t allow one to type into the flash frame to enter a musician or login.

  Last.Fm works okay, but I d avoid it. YouTube requires frequent page reloads, but once it starts working works well.

  Google Video is rather painful to deal with due to the zoom levels. This actually speaks to the web browser s poor integration in general, as it makes terrible use of screen real estate. In that spirit, it often cuts off the top of the screen on my 1080i TV.

  Honestly, I m not wanting to read blogs on my PS3, but I would like to use those media sites in my living room.
  

• The Playstation Store - nice. Here s an issue with the failure of vision - it s a nice store, it works, you can buy things - but there are no movies, no music, no TV shows.

  The 360 has this, admittedly it has a poor selection, but it does have it! HD versions, no less! You d think with this $600 dollar media hub, I could actually get some media.

  I also find it rather hard to read, as it doesn t allow you to zoom in and cuts off the edge of the screen on my television.
  

• User Interface - The UI bites. I d like to pretty that up, but really it just bites.

  It works fine when you re using the basic functionality and is fast and efficient, but it handles any media you may have stored in it rather poorly. Not easy to navigate, and you can t create playlists. For a media hub, this is rather unfortunate.

• Streaming Audio/Video, Syncing with computer, podcasts, etc. - There is none of this. There should be.

  There is no reason the PS3 can t do everything the iTunes integration the Apple TV can do. The fact it can t do any of it but actually store files you manually move there is rather sad. And appliances like the are not anything new, I ve had something that streams video from my computer for years (not well, but it does - and the UI is better!

  )

• Installing another OS - I was surprised to find Sony makes it easy to install a second OS on the device - linux, actually. I was not able to successfully do this, but that s not Sony s fault - there was some problems with the version of Ubuntu I was using, and I didn t care enough after I found the following out: Sony has limited access to the video capabilities so that anything particularly advanced (like divx files) isn t going to play well on the guest OS. So, my dreams of creating my own little media box with the guest OS went out the window with this.

  Sony is showing no signs of changing this, though there is a for them to do so, for whatever that s worth.

• Games - well, I don t know. I m playing all PS2 games and flOw right now, as there are no PS3 games I have any particular interest in playing that I ve not already played on another platform.

  But, there are some very interesting things in the works that I m looking forward to (Lair, LittleBigWorld).

I m optimistic. Sony has mentioned they will be shortly. And hopefully, they won t botch that by doing something like pricing them to sell only, or overpricing in general.

The problem was not having this in the beginning, and more! They should have included a strong media browser, specialized in viewing sites such as YouTube, streaming video and audio, a universal messaging client..

. Sony needed to create value upfront to help people get over the monstrous price tag - because if you are going to price something at $600 and call it a media hub - it needs to be a media hub.
No consumer is impressed by how much the parts cost, and the Blu-ray is not much of a selling point given the slim picking available, for a console as well as anything else (and God only knows how this next-gen DVD content war is going to pan out, no one wants to be stuck with a twenty-first century betamax).

it s all about what you provide the consumer with now, not in the future.
I m willing to hedge my bets. I m willing to wait it out, see what happens.

I ll probably end up caving in and picking up an Apple TV anyway, but I want Sony to succeed because I want to see all my shiny things working together. That seems to be the vision that Sony is selling. It s a shame that so far, it s just a vision.