I just stopped by my friendly local Target and discovered that they had a PlayStation 3 much to my surprise. A bit of disclosure, I was actually looking for a demo of the Zune, but I settled for playing the PS3 instead. Here are some of my thoughts about the PlayStation 3:

User Interface:

I browsed through the system interface a bit and was completely unimpressed. If you’ve ever used or seen a PSP then you will not be surprised by the system interface. That being said, the interface they duplicated directly from the PSP was not exactly the best thing since slice bread anyways. The overall feel of the interface is a little odd and a bit clunky to be honest. You have several top-level icons that have sub-levels that contain the additional options. For example, the top-level icons were: Music, Games, Videos, Photos, System, Friends (I don’t remember the exact name they used) and then under Music for example they had the songs organized by album (or year, genre, artist, etc). The real benefit of the Xbox 360’s “blade” interface becomes apparent once you’ve used the PlayStation 3. With the Xbox 360’s interface when you switch between the blades you are shown a colorful (while not overly busy) overview of all the options within that specific categorical blade. The major problem with the PS3’s interface is that when you switch to the Music icon it displays a drop down list of the options you can do with the Music, but they are specifically labeled until you move the cursor over them. This is just a tiny, but fairly important problem in that the user is not immediately presented with the options they are likely looking for. They will have to scroll over each icon to see it’s description before then can then select the action they want. The common phrase has always been “keep it simple stupid”, and it applies very accurately here. Don’t make your users work more, don’t make them guess what an icon represents, and definitely do not only display the description for an icon when it’s hovered over.

Summary: Bad implementation of something that should have been fairly easy to pull off. The Xbox 360 wins hands down.

Games/Graphics:

I’ll keep this brief as I haven’t bothered to follow which games are coming out for the PS3 and which are going to be unique to the PS3. The game I played on the demo unit was NBA Live 2k7. To be honest the graphics were absolutely unimpressive. Perhaps it’s just this game, but most other in-game footage I have been seeing from PS3 games has been similarly less than impressive. It’s on par with the Xbox 360 (or in the case of NBA Live 2k7, below actually) regardless of who tells you otherwise. The controls were easy to pick up, and the overall feeling of the controller was actually a little awkward. It’s pretty simple, the PS3 controller (which is virtually identical to the older PS2 controller) takes a little getting used to for a new comer who just picks up the controller. That being said, existing PS2 users will obviously be quite at home with the same exact controller. Where is the innovation Sony? Oh you mean the “motion sensitive controller”? Nope, you stole that idea directly from Nintendo.

Summary: I won’t comment on the selection games because the system is not even available yet, but the game I had a chance to play was unimpressive. The graphics are definitely not any better than the Xbox 360 and perhaps in some instances will actually be worse. This is likely a tie between the PS3 and the Xbox 360, though the 360 gets a slight advantage simply for being available for a year now.

Other Issues:

Oh, did I mention that this demo unit crashed 4 times in the 30 minutes I played on it? Yes, you read that correctly: it crashed (requiring the unit to completely reset) 4 times in 30 minutes. I’ll give Sony the benefit of the doubt and say that this is only a early demo unit and they haven’t worked out all the bugs yet…blah blah blah. Nope, sorry. They are going to be releasing the PS3’s to actual paying customers in about 1 month’s time and it definitely does not seem to be stable. I am aware that these kiosk units apparently have all kinds of heat issues which may have caused the problems I observed, but this is still Sony’s fault. If they are perfectly aware of these so called “overheating issues” with the kiosk units then they need to figure out a different way of having these kiosks setup. If a normal person walks by, sees the PS3 and picks up the controller and begins to play, only to have the system crash 4 times on them …well you can imagine they aren’t going to be very happy and they will definitely not run out to purchase a PS3 either. Sony needs to fix this problem, and pronto.

These are just my own personal thoughts/experiences with a single PlayStation 3 unit. I could have just had a bad experience with a rogue demo unit, but I am sure if you browse the web you’ll see that the crashing problem in particular is not a rare occurrence.