The PS3: Things You Need to Know (Page 3 of 3)

The first 500,000 PS3s will be packaged with a free Blu-Ray feature film.

...And no, it's not titled How Staggeringly Awesome Sony Is, Part One. It's The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, starring Will Ferrel as a NASCAR driver. It might not be your cup of tea, but it will definitely show off the capabilities of Sony's new media format. You'll get your fancy 1080p visuals, support for 7.1 surround sound, and hey, a free movie that you didn't have to download from BitTorrent like a frickin' pirate. Besides, it would have taken a week to download all that data anyway. Those audio channels don't come cheap!

On a side note, the BD-ROM spec goes up to 200 gigabytes. That's a lot of... family-friendly home movies.

There's still a hard "power-off" switch on the back of the system, just like the PS2.

We used it at one point to power down the system manually when the unit wouldn't shut down during a loading sequence. It works just like you'd expect.

The PS3 is very, very shiny.

So shiny that it's hard to take photos of it without capturing a mirror like reflection of a nearby light source. But it's an interesting design choice, and should look super-sexy in a living room lineup.

As a whole, the PS3 itself looks incredibly sexy.

It's a unanimous opinion from the journalists we spoke with at the Gamer's Day event that the PS3 is one slick piece of consumer electronics magic. It's big, but beautiful, with an elegant shape and a certain undefinable "presence."

The PS3 is super quiet.

At a rating of just 22 decibels, it's only slightly louder than a human whisper. All we know is that we could barely hear it running. That's definitely worth something.

You may have heard rumors on the Internets that the PS3 was practically setting people on fire at last month's Tokyo Game Show. Whether or not that's true, we witnessed dozens of units performing flawlessly for several hours at a press event yesterday. While the air conditioning struggled against a small army of PS3s, enormous HDTVs, and excitable game reporters, the PS3s themselves hummed along quietly and solidly.

Of course, there's always the possibility that one of them burst into flames just as we were leaving. But we're pretty confident in the system's ability to stay cool under pressure.

You can plug in a USB keyboard and surf the 'Net

The PS3 will come packaged with a free Internet browser. The "front end" has been highly customized, to the point where it's impossible to tell if it's using Mozilla, Opera, or Internet Explorer (but since the console runs on Linux, it's probably not IE). You can place multiple Web pages within view and stream media from several Internet locations simultaneously. However, it's unclear right now if any USB keyboard will work, or if you have to get a Sony-approved model. They have not announced a USB keyboard of their own.

The power supply is integrated directly into the system.

Phil Harrison told us that Sony made this choice for performance reasons, to keep the power supply as close to the CPU chipset as possible. And though the Xbox 360's external "power brick" is hardly a massive disadvantage, having the power supply integrated in the main chassis is sleeker, slicker, and all around preferable. We like, we like.

Re-download all your merch to someone else's PS3

The stuff that you bought on the PS3's online store won't stay imprisoned on your console. Just log in with your account info on someone else's unit, and you can pull everything down -- although each item has a limit of five transfers before Sony smacks your grubby fingers with a ruler.

First-party games are priced at $59.99...

...Which is in line with the Xbox 360 software pricing structure. This is comforting news, as there have been rumors that the games would cost even more thanks to more expensive Blu-ray manufacturing. No word yet on third-party game pricing; it's still possible those prices will lean higher.

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