What’s good about the Sony Playstion 3 80GB

• Swanky design ; the front-slot-loading, Blu-ray Disc drive, contributes to the unit’s slicker appearance. Discs slide in and eject smoothly enough, giving a smooth look to the design. The power button is a touch button (Kewl), with a chrome trim along the width.
• All games in high-definition; the PS3’s HD graphics go far beyond those of abysmal Wii and its stable hardware doesn’t suffer from the Xbox 360’s notorious red ring of death.
• PSP-like, easy-to-use interface; The interface is polished and is slick enough to be called Mac-like; wins from at least from an aesthetic point of view.
• Now that Blu-ray Discs have become the de facto standard for high-def media, the PS3 is still the only console available to play back that format, and consequently is the best performing and affordable Blu-ray player on the market—being able to play Profile 2.0 Blu-ray discs.
• Built-in Wi-Fi;
• 80GB hard drive; AND Play station Store allows you access to more T.V shows and movies to fill up that 80 GB hard drive.
• HDMI output with 1080p support;
• No external power supply; Hassle free and impressive. you just plug the included power cable into the back of the unit and you’re good to go for a long time to come . The free online gaming service; the PS3 has exclusive dibs on Metal Gear, Uncharted, and MLB 08: The Show, as well as the hotly anticipated Resistance 2 and Killzone 2 due to hit in upcoming months.
• As for the controllers, the L2 and R2 trigger buttons are a bit bigger, and the increased depth in stroke offers players more game control. Sony has also increased the tilting angle and motion sensitivity on DualShock 3 and Sixaxis (10-bit motion detection in all six directions) of the joysticks to give you a wider range of motion. The Sixaxis and DualShock 3 controllers also have a centered Home button, which you use it to return to the console’s main menu screen, as well as to sync the controller to the console and start it up or shut it down wirelessly
• The PS3 supports importing images from a full array of USB-attached devices, including most digital cameras, the PSP, USB flash drives, and home-burned CD-Rs.
• Good multimedia handling: A few slide-show styles are available, including a unique “photo album” view that displays the images across a white work surface as if you’d dumped them there and spread them out. When stored internally on the hard drive (copying back and forth is easy), photos appear rapidly, and in the basic slide-show mode, you can advance your slides forward by simply pressing on the top-right shoulder button (the left shoulder takes you back a slide). Most JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, and PNG images should work just fine.
• The PS3 supports most of the major music-file types, including MP3, ATRAC, AAC, and WAV, and has a built-in music visualizer. As with the photos, you can import songs from the flash card reader, a USB thumb drive or rip songs directly to the hard drive from a CD.
• On the video front, the PS3 plays Profile 2.0 Blu-ray Discs in full high-definition as well as DVD movies. It also supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4/h.264 video files from USB or disc-based media. If you transfer the videos to the PS3’s hard drive, thumbnails on the video menu are shown as 15-second video clips, rather than just as still images of the first frame of the video.
• The PS3 also has a built-in Web browser, like the PSP, but the nice thing about the PS3 is that if you connect a USB keyboard, you don’t have to type in URL addresses using the system’s tedious virtual keyboard. Likewise, a USB mouse lets you point and click your way through a Web page, just as if you were on a PC. The browser is fairly robust, and even offers limited Flash support. Overall, the browser is a nice convenience for those who want to browse from their living room couch.
• The PlayStation Network, like the Play station Store, is a heaven for gamers. Not only does it provide loads of games and services, it also allows all gamers to play online in multiplayer matches for free. Though the downloadable stuff is not for free, many game demos are.
• What’s impressive about the PS3, in fact, is that with all this power under the hood, the system runs as quietly as it does. After running for several hours straight, the system runs pretty warm, but not blazingly hot.

What’s bad about the Sony Playstion 3 80GB

• It cannot play back music from attached iPods, nor can it stream from other music players that incorporate copy-protected music formats.
• While navigating through the menu, you do have to drill down a few levels to reach certain features, and getting to some functions isn’t quite as intuitive as it should be.
• The PS3, surprisingly, lacks full backward support for PS2 games; only comes with two USB ports ( the older came with FOUR) with NONE at the back of the unit; no infrared port means non-Bluetooth universal remotes aren’t compatible; no flash card or memory reader;
• The slick looking glossy black finish is, sadly, a fingerprint and smudge magnet;
• Multiplatform games from third-party developers didn’t look appreciably better than the respective titles.
• PS3’s internal hard drive is user replaceable with any off-the-shelf laptop drive. The only catch: it uses the smaller 2.5-inch drive size, which are twice, or even close to three times as expensive as the larger 3.5-inch hard drive that go into a desktop computer.
• Unfortunately, the battery isn’t removable, which means that if it dies–as inevitably it will some day–you’ll have to replace the entire controller ($50) if you want to play wirelessly.

Sony Playstion 3 80GB Review

• Media Type: BD-ROM , CD-ROM , DVD-ROM ; Processor: Cell Broadband Engine
• You navigate horizontally through top-level selection categories such as users, system settings, and media options such as photos, music, videos, games, network, and friends. When you select a top-level category, a vertical list of sub-options appears, and you can navigate down that list until you find the option you want.
• the PlayStation 3 can stand vertically or lie horizontally in an AV rack, though because of its curved top, it’s not meant to have any other components resting on top of it. Currently the PS3 is only available in black.
• As for its dimensions, the PS3 measures 12.8 inches wide by 3.8 inches high by 10.8 inches long. That said, the PS3 does weigh a bit more–11 pounds to the 360’s 9.9 pounds including power supply–so if you’re going by heft alone, you’re getting almost 10 percent more console.
• Around back is where you’ll find ports for Ethernet, HDMI output, optical digital audio output (SPDIF), and the proprietary PlayStation AV output for analog audio and video. A composite AV cable ships with the unit, and because it uses the same connector as the PlayStation 2, that system’s S-Video and component cables should work with it, as well (to get HD video, you’ll need component or HDMI).
• The PlayStation 3’s 3.2GHz Cell processor was built from the ground up just for the console. It consists of a single PowerPC-based core with seven synergistic processing units.
• On the front, you’ll find two USB ports for connecting (and charging) controllers and other accessories, including USB keyboards, thumb drives, and the PSP.
• For starters, it’s wireless. You can connect as many as seven controllers via the system’s built-in Bluetooth, which Sony claims offers a 20-meter range (about 65 feet).
• You can continue to play as the battery juices up (Sony pledges 30 hours of game play between charges), but the cable’s somewhat short 5-foot length will put you right on top of the TV. That said, the controller has a standard mini USB port similar to the one found on many digital cameras and PC peripherals, so swapping in a longer cable–or using a USB extender–shouldn’t be a problem. We should also note that we had some success charging the DualShock 3 on a number of PC USB ports and even the port on a cable box.

Final Words and Conclusion

The bottom line: Even though PS2 backward compatibility has been dropped from this version, the 80GB PS3 is still a superb Blu-ray player and high-definition game console. Those minor gripes notwithstanding, the PS3 delivers an overall level of excellence when it comes to engineering and performance. Happy Gaming.

Related posts:

1. REVIEWS: Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) Slim console Is the time right to buy a PS3? Sony's...
2. Sony PlayStation 3 Slim Scheduled to come as the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas...
3. Sony PSP 3000 While some still believe that it sells the second violin...
4. REVIEWS: Sony PSP Go console Better or worse than before? The PSP Go comes...
5. Sony to expand PlayStation Network into Sony Online Service, sell music, books, videos Sony had a big management meeting in Japan today,...