Yeah, Squilliam will be here any second. (You know its in good humor big man)
Seriously though, as a person who works at Microsoft in the Xbox division, I can confirm how hard it is to do firmware updates with substantial changes.
Everyone should realize something:
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When the PS3 first launched the OS took up 96 mb of ram. That was terrible, since devs had to allocate ram for games and when you take 256 (since PS3 ram is split into two) and subtract 96 mb of ram - you come up with 160 available.
Ever since launch Sony has been doing as much as they can reduce the footprint of the OS WHILE adding features. This is no easy task. Concurrently its heavily rumored that the ram usage is around or under 40 mb of ram.
Since than, if you guys haven't noticed, PS3 multiplatform games have looked considerably better, and first party titles have shined in a way they haven't before.
There is a reason In-Game-Voice chat / messaging, Cross-Game Invites, and the XMB is unavailable during blurays / ps2 games. They will all come in time, but its hard to add things and remove lines of code at the same time. The biggest challenge was to get the XMB into the system. In the future you better believe you'll see caching of thumbnails in your XMB so things don't have to reload from scratch.
I predict in the next update they will remove many of the elements of the XMB that prove to be useless during IN-Game. There should be no good reason Folding at Home, the Internet Browser, and User change settings are available in the XMB In game. I expect a more streamlined and gutted XMB. This will help remove clutter and fix lockups.
I can highlight someways of lockups, if anyone wants to play bug tester for a day (its my day job :) ).
Console Agnostic since 2001.
