The past week has been a glorious week in my gaming life. As a fan of the PS2 and a recent Xbox 360 owner, I have been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to get my hands on the controversial PS3. This week I was presented with an opportunity to obtain a 20GB PS3, and I jumped at the opportunity. I received my PS3 in the mail on Tuesday and cleared a spot on my entertainment center that night.

I plugged in the unit and fired up the TV. Immediately I was greeted with the bright, symphonic opening music… and a blank screen. The PS3 I received was a used unit and was not packed at the factory, so immediately I became concerned that perhaps there was damage that occurred during shipping. I shut down everything and checked all of my connections, everything was fine. So once again, I fired it up, and again no picture. As I dug through the massive knot of cables behind my entertainment center, I began to curse the fact that I didn’t have a HDMI port on my TV. At that moment – it clicked! I have not purchased a HDTV yet and am currently using a Sanyo 36” standard definition TV. I assumed that the unit was previously used with a HDTV, so I figured that all I had to do was reset the unit to its default 480p settings. With a little research, I discovered that the display setting can be reset by turning off the unit then touching and holding down the touch sensitive switch on the front of the unit until you hear two audible beeps. (The first beep will happen immediately, the second beep will follow about six seconds later.) Once the second beep was heard I removed my finger from the switch and the display flashed to life.

As a PSP user, I was immediately on familiar ground. The navigation menus are setup just like the PSP, yet with more options and better graphics. Since my unit had settings still in place from the previous user, I decided to restore all the default settings and format the hard drive. Once everything was clear, I rebooted and instantly was taken to a series of questions asking for my language, time zone, etc…

Setting up the network connection was a snap and in no time at all I was creating my ID for the PlayStation Network. Once I was all up and running I began exploring more of the menus on the PS3, I decided to check if there were any system updates, and with no surprise, there was one. So I downloaded and installed the update. I also grabbed my PSP and decided to try to connect the two units using the Remote Play capability. Creating the connection between the two units was quick and easy. All it took was connection the two units via a USB cable and pushing a few buttons. In no time at all I was able to establish a connection to my PS3 using the PSP.

About 40 minutes after I pulled the PS3 out of the box, I had my system up and running. Since it was getting late I decided to select a few demos and trailers to download onto the PS3 and call it a night. While I had not even put a game disk into the drive yet, I am all set up and good to go. Overall, my initial experience with the PS3 was a good one. I look forward to spending more time with the unit, and will continue to post my impressions, so stay tuned for part II.

So being a child of the eighties I saw the Transformer trailer on the Playstation Network Store and downloaded it right away.  Thanks to the 1.60 firmware update I was also able to download a couple other things all at once.  By the way Sony, Thank you very much for background downloading! 

Once I watched the trailer I thought this would be cool to test the Remote Play feature.  So after playing around with the PSP and getting it connected and registered to the PS3, I was ready to start streaming content to my PSP from my PS3.  The quality of the audio and video was quite good.  Of course a fresh steaming pile of cow dung looks great on that high-resolution wide screen of the PSP.  You do not have to squint or deal with the distortion of an iPod screen. 

Unfortunately this is about the end of the positive comments to Remote Play.  I was really disheartened to see that you have to put the PS3 into a dedicated mode of Remote Play to actually stream content.  I was really hoping that I could be playing a Blu-Ray or DVD while streaming other content to the PSP.  And speaking of Blu-Ray and DVD that is a perfect segway into my next disappointment of Remote Play.  You can not stream Blu-Ray or DVD content to your PSP.  You are only allowed to stream music, video, and photo files nothing that is on disk media.  Next on my list of whines, is that you have to be connected to the same network as the PS3 to stream content to your PSP.  In my mind this makes the feature almost useless.  Really, if you are at the same location as your PS3 and your PS3 is in a dedicated Remote Play mode I do not understand why you would not simply view your content on your PS3.  The only application I could come up with is if you turned on your PS3.  Then started the Remote Play feature, and then switched you’re A/V input so that someone else could watch TV or some other media while you then viewed the content on your PS3 from your PSP.  But that seems like a pretty niche use of this PS3 Remote Play feature.  Once last complaint and this is kind of small, but if you put your PS3 into Remote Play mode the screen saver does not kick in, and the Folding@Home client does not kick in.  And as we all know PS3 owners are all about helping out their fellow man.

I think Sony has laid down a solid foundation here in Remote Play.  If they can make a couple of simple improvements to this feature I think they would see allot more customer use.  First while I am watching a Blu-Ray or DVD, if I could simply press a button on my PS3 controller and some sort of transparent menu system would start the Remote Play streaming then my wife could continue watching the movie on the couch.  While I could take the PSP that has the content streaming to it with me to the bathroom.  That would be very cool!  But what could really make Remote Play take off, and would probably sell more PSP and PS3 combinations is being able to stream content from your PS3 to your PSP over the internet.  If I could be at some hot spot and stream video or music off my PS3 onto my PSP, this would be the killer app that no Technosexual could be without.  Being able to access your media from a hotel room, lunch room at work or school, or even at your In-laws house when they are watching boring home movies or some documentary that you have no reason to have any interest in would be incredible.

While Sony has not exactly hit one out of the park with Remote Play, I think they have definitely put runners on first and second.  If they can just make a couple more improvements Remote Play may be a grand slam product. It could be so big Mr. Trenton will not have to worry about taking out a second mortgage on his house to pay off the $1200 wagers of finding a PS3 on shelves for more then five minutes.  The PSP would likely start out selling the Nintendo DS for once and that should bring a smile to any Sony Executives face!

But enough of my rant how are you currently using Remote Play?