The PlayStation Evolution

Since the release of PSP, Sony’s been about creating platforms that aren’t just for gaming. Right now, both the PSP and PS3 are
great for playing back movies, music, and displaying photos when you’re taking a break from button-bashing madness. Here’s how Sony plans to turn its PSP / PS3 combo into a real force to be reckoned with in 2008.

PlayTV - TV tuner/recorder

Sony revealed at the Leipzig Games Convention last September its plans to turn PS3 into a digital TV receiver and recorder with the new PlayTV service.

Now, if you’ve got Sky Plus already you probably won’t give a damn. But with the ability to pause live TV, and to record programs onto the hard drive for later viewing, PlayTV is a luxury that many of us will be looking forward to.

This is big bananas for the PS3 as a platform too, though. The phenomenal success of PS2 was partly thanks to the legions of people who bought it simply to use as a DVD player - the uncles out there that considered the game-playing part a mere bonus.

Those same people will be picking up a PS3 for its affordable, upgradeable Blu-ray capabilities as the population converts to HD entertainment, and the inclusion of recordable digital TV is, for those people, another crucial reason to buy the console over a dedicated Blu-ray player.

Hopefully Sony will keep the price of the receiver nice and low, so it can appeal to those same people, who tend not to like buying add-ons for consoles.

Home

Sony is taking its bloody time with this one, but it insists that the virtual world for PS3 has to be nothing short of perfect before it’s released. Of course it won’t be, but the firm’s aiming high with this one.

Home is one of those things that, if done right, could have A-bomb-like impact on PS3, bringing the PlayStation community together with a level of virtual interactivity not available on any other console. It’ll give PS3 owners their own virtual space that could become as precious to them as the MySpace and Facebook phenomenon of the internet. Sony wants it to be more of course, but one step at a time.

It could become the place you spend time in everyday, searching for new content, meeting other people and making Xbox Live feel like a relatively shallow, empty experience faced by nothing but menu screens.

Home could be incredible. But if done wrong - if it doesn’t run smoothly, connect gamers the way it promises to, feature all the constantly-added content or be easily personalised - it could just become another ignored icon on your XMB menu.

Go! Explore - GPS on PSP

None of us have TomToms in our cars. It’s got the worst name for a gadget ever, and the three-figure price tag is a lot to pay for fancy road maps that point you to the shops. They only end up getting stolen anyway.

So Sony unveils Go! Explore for PSP, which will be cheaper, smaller and more convenient than a dedicated machine.

Skype

If GPS support isn’t already good enough a reason to carry about your PSP everywhere, how about the ability to use it as a phone over the internet?

Skype, a free voice-over-IP (VOIP) program currently used by PC types, will allow PSP owners to contact each other for free, using a microphone attachment that’ll come with the software. As long as you’re in range of a Wi-Fi access point, you’re good to chat as long as you like.

You can call real phones from it too, although that’ll cost a little - but it should be reasonably cheap. The only major downer is that Skype will only work on PSP Slims. Owners of the older model - Sony’s loyal early purchasers - will miss out on it completely, or be forced to make the upgrade. Thanks for that Sony.

Profile 2.0 Blu-ray support

A slightly less significant but nevertheless noteworthy part of PlayStation’s evolution, particularly in 2008, is the expansion of PS3’s Blu-ray playback abilities.

Profile 2.0 Blu-ray features will be launched later this year, which will allow users to download new content for their films, including trailers, features and ringtones.

But most of the dedicated Blu-ray players on the market to date lack support for internet connection, rendering them completely incapable of supporting the internet-centred features of Profile 2.0.
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