As we reported earlier today, Sony has officially launched Life with PlayStation, a new news/weather browsing feature for the PS3 that works in conjunction with the Folding@home project. In a nutshell, now when you fire up Folding@home, instead of just seeing an interface that shows your research contributions, you are treated to a massive globe which shows up-to-date cloud and weather patterns, and allows you to see the current weather and the latest news for various world locales. This new feature is called the LIVE CHANNEL, and it is but the first offering — Sony promises that eventually, “Life with PlayStation will continually deliver a wide variety of interactive content and channels to living rooms through network connected PS3s to further enhance the world of entertainment made possible by PS3.” Needless to say, we wanted to see just how wonderful a life Sony was offering. Unfortunately, having explored all of the new features, we’d advise you to wait for a little more work to be done, because so far, Life Stinks.
Don’t get me wrong: The Folding@home project is a marvelous idea, and I wholeheartedly advocate contributing to such important research when your PS3 would be otherwise idle. Hopefully, one day, Life with PlayStation will offer something more, but for now, all it offers is a slightly prettier interface for Folding, with extremely poor functionality.
Downloading the new application, at least, is nice and easy — the PS3’s usual download-and-install routine doesn’t even require a visit to the store, functioning instead as a quick update to the Folding software, accessible from the XMB. Assuming your connection is quick, you’ll be up and running in 5-10 minutes. From there, Life with PlayStation offers an extremely simple interface, including the ability to swap between the new LIVE CHANNEL and the Folding@home channel at will, changing the on-screen globe from a cloud-scattered Google Earth-style interface to a lighted map of Folding contributors. You can also quickly and easily select background music for the interface, allowing you to listen to a handful of included muzak tunes, or browse your PS3’s HD library. This all works extremely easily and quickly, and is an admirably simple way to get around Life with PlayStation. The problem, unfortunately, is that all of these options are operating on the notion that you’ll want to use Life with PlayStation for any amount of time. Life with PlayStation presents a lovely interface for some nearly useless content.
Beyond the admittedly nice-looking globe interface, Life with PlayStation promises the following:
- Live Camera Feeds (for select cities)
These camera feeds are tiny. Furthermore, they are not “live.” I’m being overly nit-picky here; the camera images are provided by various webcam services, and Life updates the images as often as they do — which is to say, once every hour or two. Sony obviously shoulders no blame for not updating content faster than their providers give it to them, but if you’re going to call something “live,” well, it ought to be live. Also, it’d be nice to zoom in on the images — as it is, they’re pretty tiny.
- Cloud Data
This is handled perfectly fine — zooming out on the Earth will let you see a (presumably) recently updated cloud map, allowing you to track current weather patterns graphically. We have no complaints about this feature — it’s actually pretty cool.
- Weather
Just like the Weather Channel on the Wii, scrolling over or past one of Life with PlayStation’s mapped cities will display the current temperature and conditions, including tiny little suns, clouds, rainstorms, etc. Unfortunately, unlike the Wii’s channel, that’s as far as you can go. No highs and lows, no 5-day forecast, not so much as a hint of what tomorrow will bring. You can change the temperature between Fahrenheit and Celsius, and that’s it. I suppose it’s cute to be able to glance at global conditions, but nine times out of ten, when I’m wondering about the weather, I’m not wondering how it is, I’m wondering how it will be. A weather function without forecast data? Moving on…
- News
On the surface, this seems like a perfectly helpful feature. Scrolling over to a city offers a dynamically generated list of recent news stories, as provided by Google News. Assuming you like the non-forecasting weather feature, Life with PlayStation appears to combine multiple features in one place, so you don’t have to constantly pop out to the menu for separate weather and news feeds. Then, you try to actually use it. I hope you like squinting.
Life with PlayStation’s news feature is practically unusable. Calling up a story clearly uses the console’s built-in web browser, and pops up a window featuring the story you’ve selected. Unfortunately, since this is simply a Folding feature rather than a fully realized news browser, the navigation has been completely crippled, which honestly wouldn’t be a problem, except that they took out the zoom function. On a big, powerful 1080 HDTV — which, if you’re Sony’s ideal demographic, you’re using — the text’s default size is unbearably tiny. It’s tiny to the point of being nearly unreadable, leaving you with two possible choices:
- Squint really hard at the TV and/or get off the couch and stand very close to the TV, get an eyestrain headache after half a news story, wonder why you can’t zoom in on the tiny text, and never use the news feature again.
- Manually adjust your PS3’s display settings (which requires you to quit out of Life with PlayStation) to display at a much lower resolution, which increases the text size but lowers the quality, making the text equally unreadable, and making the rest of Life with PlayStation look ugly. Realize you’ll have to manually tweak your display settings between each visit to Life with PlayStation and using the system for any other purpose, and never use the news feature again.
In addition, due to the news feature being based around a gimped web browser, Life with PlayStation has left its functionality full of application-breaking holes. I was able to destroy the program in under a minute, simply by using functions that the program made available. The news stories, being powered by Google News, each contain a link to the main Google News webpage, which necessarily contains Google’s omnipresent search bar. Life with PlayStation, unfortunately, clearly never intended there to be much in the way of user input; selecting the bar and attemping to bring up the text input box will lock up the program for quite a while, and in several cases, leave you with a dropped connection.
To top it all off, the simple lack of a zoom function makes the Remote Play functionality laughable. The PSP remote play, to its credit, does everything it ought to do: Using your PSP, you can connect to the PS3 directly or via the internet, boot up your PS3 and start Life with PlayStation, getting the full functionality of both Folding and LIVE CHANNEL right there on your PSP screen. The program’s extremely simple interface means nothing is lost on the PSP, you can still cruise the globe, see your (non-forecast) weather, and see the “live” city images and news. Sadly, if the news was difficult to read on the PS3, it is utterly illegible on the PSP. The lack of a zoom function here causes the dirty, pixellated, tiny news copy to be unreadable by human eyes. That is not hyperbole — I challenge anybody to call up a Life with PlayStation news story on their PSP and read through it. The light grey blobs that qualify as the transmitted text aren’t going to be terribly informative, I think.
As a tech demo for PS3/PSP cross-functionality, Life with PlayStation’s Remote Play is fairly neat. It’s just that there’s only one possible reason to use it, and that’s if you’re not home but you want to fire up your PS3 to make sure you’re using the system’s downtime for Folding. If you want to check the news and weather on your PSP, it has a web browser, with zoom functions. Use that.
We’ll keep our fingers crossed for more practical additions to Life with PlayStation, but for the moment, you needn’t rush to download the update.
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