Life With Playstation: Weather And News Channels Application Coming To PS3
Much of the recent design decisions for the Playstation 3 seems to be a "Me too!" attitude. This is not necessarily a bad thing, many of the choices made by the other video game industry players have been good ones. Concepts like downloadable software and content, user profiles, in game system menu access are great things and it only makes sense to run with it.
Sony has decided that along with the new movie downloads service and in game XMB support, they will be adding a new service called Life With Playstation. Initially this service will provide real-time visuals of the planet earth composed from satellite data to create a weather and news application.
Much of the idea seems to be ripped straight from the Wii channels, but Sony president Kaz Hirai has no intention of stopping there with their product.
For the primary version the application sticks to the present time but in the future we plan to build a system that can visually present stored photos and movies according to their recorded time and place, allowing users with their friends and family to enjoy the visuals in chronological order,
It seems like they are going with a combo Flickr geo-tagging with news and weather strapped on it's back. I'm not going to say this is a bad idea, in fact the news and weather are a good way to start the morning with the Wii, although this gives me one less reason to start that machine up. The release for this application is yet to be announced.
Sony Previews 'Life With PlayStation' [PC World]
PS3新規コンテンツ「Life」 [Dengeki Online]
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 26 June 2008
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: life with playstation, news, playstation 3, sony, weather
As interesting as this almost is, I really wish that Sony would leave the "lifestyle" software others and deliver some more games.
The reason I say this is because while the Wii could be someone's only interactive box hooked up to a TV, I'm going to guess that most PS3 owners likely have this stuff already at their finger tips with other devices. Call me crazy, but this just doesn't seem like the best use of resources, at least to me. Who knows, maybe they have something bigger/grander in mind?
Yeah, I get weather and news emailed to me or see it in my feed reader long before I get to the Wii. Granted, I'm probably more technical than most Wii users, but I think there are more gadget freaks among PS3 users. I guess Nintendo's interface is cute and probably impressive to people who don't realize how inefficient it is, and judging by the screenshots, Sony has fallen into the same trap to a degree.
I would think they're too smart to do a "me too" at this late stage, and that this is just a launchpad for something more impressive.