Introduction

It was an interesting day here Monday in the Callaham household as the UPS truck drove up around 9:30 am to bring us, somewhat unexpectedly, a Playstation 3 retail unit from Sony ahead of its US launch on Friday (this is the $599 version by the way with the 60 GB hard drive, the MemoryStick/DS/CompactFlash memory card slots and the integrated Wifi). As readers of FiringSquad may know we have been pretty critical of Sony and the PS3 ever since last May at E3 when it was revealed that the console would have a price point of $499 and $599 for the two models. Now that we actually have a real live working PS3 to play around with for a few hours, can it make us converts to its console?

The retail PS3 unit comes with the console itself, a Blu-Ray version of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, a power cable, one wireless SIXAXIS PS3 controller, a short USB cable for charging up the controller, and an AV connector for the TV. Not in the retail box but included in our review unit was an HDMI cable. Folks who want the full 1080p experience for the supported PS3 games and the Blu-Ray movies will have to pay extra for the cable.

Install other OS? Vista or Linux come to mind

Great, more ways to splurge

Updating is good

Setting up the PS3 is pretty simple. You put the power cord in the back of the console, then plug it into the socket (yeah, that’s pretty elementary but guess how many people don’t do this). We used the HDMI cable to hook it up to our 42 inch plasma TV from Toshiba. The PS3, like the PS2, has a switch in the back that needs to be pushed that powers up the console. A red light then starts glowing on the front. Then comes the cool part. The actual PS3 on/off button isn’t really a button at all, It’s a slightly raised symbol on the flat surface just below the Blu-Ray slot loading drive that you just push ever so slightly. When that happens the PS3 starts to come on.

If you haven’t done this beforehand, now is the time to plug in the SIXAXIS controller via the USB cable. You push the PS button in the center (similar to the Xbox 360’s center symbol button) and then you are taken to the set up screens where you put in your user name for the console, date, time zone and so on. Finally the system shows you the main PS3 screen (with a violin orchestra opening). As you may have seen from previous photos taken of the PS3 UI, it looks pretty similar to the UI for Sony’s PSP console.

Surf the 'net without a keyboard?

It is shiny, like Ben Kingsley's head

Can I use bugmenot here?

We immediately went to try out the integrated WiFi and the console quickly found our WiFi network. However, we had to immediately download a rather large update to the PS3 in order to continue being online. This 1.10 update took several minutes to download (and we have a 10 Mb cable download). Once the download was complete it asked us to install the update which we did. The 1.10 update now gave us access to the PS3 web browser which we gave you a preview of on Monday.

Since some of you had some concerns about the web browser, let me give you my impressions. Sony’s PS3 browser can be used with the controller but it’s a lot easier just to plug in a USB PC keyboard to type in URLs and a PC mouse to navigate the pages (and yes we did do both). The browser doesn’t appear to be all that advanced in terms of supporting features. The Flash support is outdated (several sites asked us to upgrade to the latest version to see their site correctly) and there doesn’t appear to be a way to play Windows Media Player or QuickTime videos inside the browser either. All in all this will not be replacing my Firefox 2.0 on my PC anytime soon.

Light and dark

Looks exactly the same as the PS2 rumble pad

Looks like JCal is playing... R5EIS7AN: Deal X%^#&