Sony online

The good stuff:
*The store seems to be well laid out. You can download demos, videos and movie trailers, and the options are easy to read and understand.
*A free Web browser is included with the system. It even plays YouTube videos, which is probably the sort of content that PS3 buyers are most interested in.
*Online gameplay -- at least in Resistance -- is rock solid, with no lag even when a ton of players are in the game. Very nice work, Sony.

The bad:
*No background downloading. When you're downloading something from the store, you have to just sit there and watch the download meter. You can't play games, surf the Web or do anything else. Microsoft took a lot of heat for this same issue with the 360, before finally fixing it with a patch several months ago. Microsoft should have known better, but Sony's failure to learn from Microsoft's blunder is just inexcusable.
*The Web browser is nearly useless for almost all regular browsing. It's slow, requires to you to click an "okay" button every time a site wants to run some standard software, and entering text into the address bar with the controller is tedious. If you have a USB keyboard, plug it in and spare yourself the hunting and pecking.
*No way to tell what your friends are doing online, or even if they are online. With the 360, you can see what all your friends are doing with the click of a couple buttons, and then quickly send a game invite if any of them are online. You can't do any of that on the PS3.

Sony will probably get most of the online issues sorted out with some software patches and updates. But there's no reason to be reinventing the wheel when Microsoft already spent a lot of time and money hammering out a perfectly good model.

Sony does have some interesting long-range plans for the online service.

Going Forward

I got to interview John Smedley, head of Sony Online Entertainment, last week, and he said that Sony does plan to release big-budget titles purely as digital downloads at some point in the PS3's lifespan. These games will only be available online, and the first title will be an MMO of some sort.

He also said that Sony will eventually introduce a network storage service, so that instead of having to download all this content to your PS3's hard disc, it will be stored on Sony servers, and you'll be able to access it whenever you want. Sort of like video-on-demand. That should be a boon for gamers who don't want to spend a fortune on extra hard drives.

Finally, the ability to buy and download vintage PSone titles and play them on your PS3 or handheld PSP will open up a massive catalogue of older titles that many gamers may have missed the first time around. That service is just getting started in Japan and should be available stateside soon.