Kelvin-Lew.com

As promised (not that anyone is actually looking forward to it), the 2nd part of my crappy review I will show some cool features of the heart and soul of my home entertainment centre, the Sony Playstation 3 and the Playstation Portable. Also how both of them could work together in a totally cool but useless way.

However, as I run out of stuff to show, this review series will end on part II. If you have been reading the 1st part, I said that it would be a trilogy of sorts. Well, it is… sort of. A trilogy in 2 parts. You can break it up into 3 yourself if you want to. I don’t care. Now, that’s an activity for you courtesy of Kelvin-Lew.com.

Shiny black thing

"He ain't heavy, he's my brother"

Kickin’ this review off is a picture of where I keep the Playstations. The now neglected PS2 is right up there. “Rest well my faithful one. You’ve been through enough.”

The main star is of course the fat one below. I sorta like how Sony could make it attract fingerprints and dust so well. Way to go, Sony! Now I can go on and do some dusting and cleaning instead of sitting on my ass all day gaming. Again I’m not gonna list out in detail what it can do, but I’ll let the pictures do the talking and just pick out some cool stuff to say and throw in a lame joke or two.

The Space Invaders lost sight of the player's craft

After powering it up, I’m greeted by a soothing melody after a loud beep. Then up pops the screen shown above. The background is some wavy thingie and the colour changes according to the time of the day and month. Sorta like a female, I guess. The interface is christened “Xross Media Bar” by some crazy Japanese dudes, or XMB for short. It is quite simple and elegant but rather tedious if you tend to have lotsa media. You’ll tend to see more of this in newer Sony TVs and phones.

The main purpose of the PS3 is of course to play games. But since the games available now are drier than my grandma’s ***sy, I’ll show you what else it can do.

Piccies, Pix, Pics

Taking a picture of a picture

As Sony seems to market this one hell of a paperweight as a media device, it must of course be able to show boring ol’ vacation pictures to your friends. And it does it well too. The above picture is one type of slideshow where your pictures are shown “thrown” onto the table and some other crazy stuff like that to show off how the 7 processors in the machine could render physics and lighting etc instead of doing something useful like say cure cancer. Oh wait, it can.

Longitudinal waves between 20Hz-20kHz

"I can't think of any more witty captions, why don't YOU do it, you funny man"

Moving on to music. It does it pretty well if I can say so myself. Only lacking playlist support but might be fixed later. Lucky I have only a handful of music. Nothing special to talk about here. Your PC might do a better job here. After pressing the “x” button, you’ll then be brought “flying through a canyon” while listening to Paris Hilton (whereby you might as well jump off a canyon) as seen below. One of the many seizure-inducing “visualizations”.

Wheeeeeee!

Moving images with sound

"Geeky cartoon-1, Wavy thingie-0"

On to videos/movies. The PS3 has a built in BluRay drive which can read almost any optical disc format since the beginning of time (except for Microsoft’s HD-DVD). So movies and other moving images are not a problem for this beast. A nice feature is the icon where you are shown a preview of the movie it entails. You can’t see it moving in the picture above because err, it’s not moving? Think “Live Preview” in Vista.

Here’s a video on an upcoming game. Yes, it’s a “game”.

The new Audi just came back from the dentist

The other stuff etc

Mr. Smiley was green with envy of Mr. Squarehead

There’s a friends list feature where you can chat/talk/bug/harass others who own a PS3 as well. I have only 1 friend. I know, I AM THAT SAD.

If I'm gonna take over the world, I'm gonna do it with a sparkle

Can't get enough of me

There’s also a handy albeit slow browser for those who just can’t have enough of Internet Porn Youtube.

Now let’s move on and see what the PS3’s slimmer and more popular cousin can do.

The little black thing

My screen is bigger than your screen

This nifty little piece of gadget is the Playstation Portable. It’s like a Playstation 2 in your pocket and more. You can play games with it, surf the web with it, listen to music with it and make love to it watch videos on it. That’s all nice and dandy but “Meh” I hear you say, so let me show you something cool called “Remote Play”.

This is the default PSP screen. Notice the blue screen and the simple wavy thingie.

"It's not a blue movie, mom"

With a wave of the magic Sony wand, and a chant of “Geekaroonie”, Playstation 3 on your PSP!

Man in the mirror

It's tough trying not to take my own picture

It’s somewhat useless if you are in the same room as your PS3 but you can actually access your media on your PS3 anywhere in the world with your PSP as long as your PS3 is online. A sample of it playing music and a crappy picture of it playing a movie is shown below.

Bad reception

The nearest I could ever get to owning a Ferrari

That pretty much wraps up my foray into the reviewing world. From the looks of it, it might be my last. But I’m currently playing around with a prototype phone from Nokia. Still under wraps but once it’s on the market, a review is inevitable (maybe not).