Ars Techina re-reviews the PS3...

[MikeB]

I expected Ars Technica's original review to be more hardware specifications centric. But it's nice to see them re-evaluate the platform.

From a hardware perspective the PS3 was IMO near a 10/10 (considering hardware specs provided for its IMO amazingly low price), but it's daring radically new design (especially with regard to the Cell technology and lesser extend the Blu-Ray drive) was and still posses somewhat a problem with regard to the amount of software R&D required to correctly tap its potential.

I agree the original firmware and most launch games would justify a 7/10 score from the user perspective though. Resistance: Fall of Man and Motorstorm though were IMO great launch titles, so 6/10 seems too low for me.

From a hardware perspective it was very likely there would be major enhancements, for instance the PS3 has two 128 MB flash memory chips for the firmware while the 360 only has 32 MB for this in total and for that platform there's little to no room for major improvement from this perspective.

The upcoming Playstation Home and music / movie additions I expect to be great value add from the end user perspective.

With regard to media distribution I hope and expect them to continue to aim for a similar end user experience as these Sony services provide:

Qore service
SingStore interface

A software emulator for the PS2 is also rumoured to be in the works for release later this year, this for those PS3s lacking the PS2 chips. Just so much to do for Sony, but IMO there's plenty of time. IMO the PS3 will only really start to hit the full mass market with a cheaper slimline version and the release of Final Fantasy XIII. By then the hardware will be far less costly for them to make and I expect major marketing hype when all the loose ends come together.

It just takes a lot of time and effort to get everything right (such as the upcoming DVR and PlayTV DVB-T functionality) and optimising existing components as well as possible. A lot of requested features have been added with past firmware updates such as a more integrated PSN store, XMB customization, BD 2.0 support, DivX support, DTS-HD Audio and many other improvements.

There's just so much they can and will implement, first up should be firmware update 2.4 which will include in-game XMB access including communication improvements such as video chat and is rumoured to introduce a Trophy system (which can be used with or without the upcoming Playstation Home service) and custom music selection.

It would be nice if all the big review sites will fully re-evaluate the platform by the time a slimline model hits the market.