Ever since E3 it seems like Sony has finally begun to stop taking itself so seriously and began to have a little fun. After more than a year of corporate platitudes sent to the masses, Jack Trenton stood on stage and joked about news leaking out of the company into the press. He made a concerted effort to say something to the effect of ‘We heard you and we will do it better.’ With the announcement of firmware 3.0 at Gamescon in Cologne a month ago and subsequent demonstrations (see video in David’s article here), it looked like Sony listened and heeded the voices of their consumers.

While I applaud Sony’s efforts to improve the PS3 and PSN experiences, I downloaded firmware version 3.0 and began playing around with it. While all the new features are improvements to the firmware, once again it feels like Sony came out of the gate strong, only to have a lackluster finish. Some of the improvements feel short-sighted, like the designers had an idea, never thought outside the box and then ran the results by a group of focus testers made up of pundits who live by NPD numbers and polls and fanboys with unconditional love and can’t wait for the next press release to drop.

The new What’s New section is a perfect example of this. First line is great, it gives me what is new in games and movies on the Playstation Store – the second line is a listing of what I’ve been playing. I don’t need to know what I’ve been playing because I remember it. This would be a great feature if this were a “resume” feature. If I’m in the middle of a level in Little Big Planet, I could cut out and resume my place in the game at a later date – not unlike the resume feature in a DVD player. It would certainly save on the energy cost of leaving the machine on in a paused state. Unfortunately, it does none of this, it simply lists the games I’ve played recently and I obviously must be too lazy to click left twice to my list of games to play. Other than that, I really liked that a box told me that there was a new Pulse to watch, except my only option is to click ‘X’ and begin buffering it to watch it. I kept hitting the triangle button looking for an option to download now in the background, but to no avail. It is completely understandable to want to make things simple, but not at the expense of the power users, who are extremely familiar with console’s functionality.

Another neat feature that came with the firmware update was a change to the information bar. Not exactly a useful bar, unless you only needed the time of day, the small space now includes how many friends you have on and whether or not there are messages awaiting you in your inbox. Interaction between friends has not really been Sony’s priority and it’s great that they’ve begun to move down this path, but knowing how many friends are on is not that helpful unless I can act on it. Map it to a button that when I push it a menu appears that lists who is online and what my options are: text or voice chat with one or invite all or some into a party room. Even better would be an invite-all to my place in Playstation Home. Why isn’t Sony integrating Home more into the Playstation experience? Yes, they have blundered with this since Home’s inception, but the potential is there to make turning on your PS3 more worthwhile than a swooshy line and sparkilies on the screen. The addition of more avatars demonstrates that Sony still can’t decide to embrace Home or let it die.

The final major enhancement is the addition of dynamic themes. In the demonstration video, the Little Big Planet dynamic theme looked really cool. It felt stylized and supposedly utilizes the time of day to change the look. I wanted one. I went to my Theme Settings and was disappointed to find that there was no simple example offered for free from Sony. I wasn’t expecting the LBP theme for free or anything but it would have been nice to have a simple dynamic theme even if the theme had explanations of the features with arrows pointing to the items that were changing. That’s okay, but it should be easy to buy one to try it out. Unfortunately, I was very wrong. While Sony put a Playstation Store icon in the games section to take you directly to games to buy, and a Playstation Store icon in the movies section to take you directly to movies to purchase, there was nothing that would take me directly to purchase a theme. For a company trying to make things easy, this was becoming complicated. I went into the Playstation Store from its normal location and went to the themes section. There wasn’t a special sign to get a new dynamic theme or even a sort function so that I could see all the cool dynamic themes I had available to purchase. There wasn’t even an indicator on any of the themes to purchase whether it was dynamic or not. Sony, I wanted to try dynamic themes, I was even willing to purchase one, but the amount of work I had to put in to find just the LBP theme turned me off and you received nothing from me.

Overall, the Sony firmware 3.0 update has more than a couple of great features that improve the global PS3 experience. Unfortunately, these are all marred by the shortsightedness in each feature. Sony still has a long way to go if they want to make the console owners the focus of the Playstation 3 and not the hardware itself. I’m happy with what I received, but I want more; I need more.