Yesterday I watched Prison Break. On Hulu. On the PS3. So there’s that. The browser seems to work well – a bit laggy at times but considering it’s essentially a bonus over all the other capabilities the hardware has, I can’t complain too much. I did also have a minor freak-out yesterday morning when I thought the second controller wasn’t charging, but as it turns out it can only charge when the console is powered on. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I think Sony is operating under the assumption that PS3 is going to be an always-on sort of console (see below).

Making Connections

Today the HDMI cable and adaptor that I previously mentioned arrived, so I could finally see the PS3 in all of its 1080i (that’s the best we can do right now) glory. What a difference! Text is crisp and clear, and everything looks so much more right. Another side note – I had originally ordered the component cables from Walmart using the gift card that came with the PS3 – but when I returned them they gave me cash; I found that odd. Great, but odd.

I also picked up an ethernet hub, as our router is completely used up when it comes to wired ports. Everything worked immediately as it should on both the 360 and PS3, so I was happy not to have to play network troubleshooting.

Customization

I still have not played any games, but I downloaded some themes. Like the 360, you can change the backgrounds and such to better suit your mood, but the PS3 takes it one step further and includes a new icon set with each theme as well as some wallpapers. And like the 360 (again), you can mix and match somewhat, so you can have a certain set of icons tied to a different background image.

Even better, you can download images via the web browser and use those as your backgrounds – there’s a whole Flickr group dedicated to it.

Life With Playstation

There’s one other interesting tidbit, and then I’m off to play some Little Big Planet for the first time – Life With Playstation. Picture the channels that the Wii has – weather, news, etc, and you’ll already have some idea of what this is. There are two sections right now – the Live Channel, which provides a global view of weather and news headlines on a regional basis (served by Google!), and more interestingly, Folding@home, which adds the PS3 to Stanford University’s Distributed Computing Project, intended to “research protein folding and misfolding to gain an understanding of how these are related to disease.”

As weird as that sounds, it’s really quite an amazing feature to include in a video game console. I’m not sure what the project has accomplished thus far or will accomplish in the future, but the fact that Sony has contributed to the effort with the PS3 is really pretty cool.