If you were someone looking forward to Home, do you feel suspicious in any way?  Think about it.  MS beat Sony to the punch on a new interface and had everyone buzzing.  I have friends who barely play their consoles at all and don't follow the industry enough to know about NXE, and they ALL knew about it and were excited to download it.  (For the record, I don't hate NXE, but also didn't see the need for it.)

So now Home is suddenly going to come out about as deep into 2008 as you can get and is being tagged as a public beta.  I feel like this is a bad move, and a lame attempt at playing cover-ass.  What it tells me is that Home is not ready for prime time, probably doesn't have enough content, and may even be buggy.  But since Sony seems to feel that Home must be released in 2008, they're going to slap the "public beta" label on it.  That way if it sucks (I'm fairly certain that it will at first) you can't really be mad.  It's a beta, right? 

If I were a PS3 fanboy hoping that Sony will gain some market share, I would be pissed about this.  Sony's hopes of "winning" the holiday shopping season are dead.  There is no way Home has time to drum up enough business to catch up before Christmas.  You know when Home WOULD have time to do that?  2009!!!!  The PS3 has some great games on the way in 2009.  With a good ad campaign for Home and some well placed PR about Killzone 2, GT5, God of War 3, etc., Sony could really get their act together. 

Sony is nickel diming their way through this generation, and I really think that in the end it's going to bite them in the ass.

The simple answer - no. It will be nice to see how it progresses as it seems it will always be a work in progress. It may be a bit light and spartan at present but it will be nice to see the changes.

Good point--I can agree with that.

if anything its late. lol they announced it over 2 years ago.

Here is what I suspect might have happened. Sony were not sure about issues like load balancing and basically suddenly 1000's using an untried service. When the closed Beta went into full swing, it was probably more an exercise in testing the server stress. I suspect Sony found maybe better (beta? lol) results than expected and thought to themselves that they could make Beta go open.

Who knows. I was in closed Beta for just a week and I got the feeling I was seeing a solid framework for cool things to come. In that respect, I thought it was maybe a few months away before the actual amount of content seemed sufficient. But now I think it was just for Sony to do proper stress testing.

I wonder if the "open" beta will suddenly have a fair bit more content? Will be interesting.

No, I hardly think it's possible to accuse Sony of releasing Home too early at this point.

i have played around with home at my friends house when he got an invitation to the closed beta. The biggest thing I hated about home was the load times it takes way to long to load areas like the courtyard and the bowling alley

Home is late!

Yeah it's a bit slow but I have a non-standard 320gb HDD in my PS3 and I think it's performance is helping out a bit there. I find the load on the slowish side for the modules in PSHome but not enough to personally annoy me.

welll I don't think..... wait..... WTF???? To early????!!!