PS3 Firmware Upgrade 1.6: What's Inside Hallelujah for background downloads and keyboard, mouse support. On Thursday, flipping on the ol' PlayStation 3 will service a reason other than watching Casino Royale on Blu-ray for the tenth time; Sony will deliver the long-anticipated 1.6 firmware update for the hardware, ushering in a number of new features. First and foremost, there's background downloading that can queue up to six downloads, to be managed via a new Download Management menu under the XMB's Network icon. This does not, however, allow you to play games and download simultaneously -- this will presumably come in a later update. Rather, downloads will occur in the background while streaming videos, music photos from the hard drive and web browsing. As mentioned on the 1UP Yours podcast on Friday, the update adds Folding@Home, a "distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and many cancers." Essentially, you leave your PS3 on and Folding@Home leverages the advanced computing power of your PS3 to make small steps towards understanding these diseases. Also helpful in the 1.6 firmware is support for Bluetooth-enabled wireless keyboards and mice, and text entry has been tweaked to feature a complete QWERTY keyboard, rather than the predictive, cell phone-style text entry that'd been present previously. The web browser's also been fitted with a zoom button to produce "the optimal viewing size for the selected area of a Web page at the press of a button." Other misc. features include: # Remote Play -- This feature, enabling you to access photos, videos, and music on your PS3 system's hard drive from a nearby PSP system, will be available for the 20GB configuration, when utilizing an external Wi-Fi router or local wireless access point. # Disc Auto-Start -- This new option under System Settings allows you to choose whether or not a disc should start automatically upon inserting the disc or turning on your PS3 system. # Blu-ray Disc Rewriteable (BD-RE) -- PS3 system can now playback BD-RE discs (version 3.0).

Ok, as long as this doesn't happen with Background Downloading, I'll be happy: Say I am downloading a demo. I get about 50%. I decide I've had enough poking around the music, and go to play a game. My download is automatically stopped. That's cool. But if I come back, and find out that stopping my download has made it so I have to start from scratch... Because that's what happens now. If I cancel a download, I can't resume it later (like the 360 does.) It's just GONE. So, Sony better have put some sort of a download manager capable of resuming downloads in progress, or I am going to have lost all faith is the capability of this company.

Not sure why the inability to download while playing games was called out in the original article, as the Xbox360 does the same thing. (You can often keep downloading until you reach a title screen, but then it will stop once game play begins.) However, I fully agree that you should be able to download while watching Blu-ray movies. I wish that both Xbox360 and PS3 would let you use some kind of download manager like web services did back in the days of paying by the hour for the Internet. It was great to be able pick the things you want to download, place them in a list, and then have your system download them and turn off when complete while you sleep.

there is no reason you shouldnt be able to download and play a game. maybe it doesn't load as fast but it should be possible.