Well, well, look who seems to be waking up fighting. The Sony seems to have gotten tired of being beaten up every which way by the Xbox 360 and decided to come out swinging by adding Netflix to its repertoire.

The PS3 Slim and subsequent price drop increased sales by 300% in September. This was quickly followed by Naughty Dawg’s Uncharted Two which is selling beyond expectations. Now the Playstation Blog announcement that Netflix is coming to the console. This should get s ready for God of War 1 and 2 re-release, Modern Warfare 2 and Ratchet and Clank in November.

Microsoft announced that they had an exclusive partnership with Netflix earlier this year. This, to me, signifies that they have a partnership to be in the firmware since the PS3 implementation is disc based (BD-Live). I would not be surprised if we see a firmware based (or software based like the EYE Toy application and Home) implementation by E3 next year.

The news that make me the most happy however, is that there is no additional cost to using Netflix on the PS3. I’m sure this will change soon, but Microsoft requires a Xbox Live Gold membership ($50/year) in order to use Netflix (Twitter and Facebook as well). I wouldn’t be surprised if they open some functionality to Silver members and keep viewing rooms for Gold members only or something similar.

With the inclusion of Netflix, it seems that Sony really is trying to mark this year as a W. They still have a lot of work to do, but this is not a bad place to start.

Source: Playstation Blog

The PSP Go is a solid piece of hardware. It has a large screen, and a pretty decent design. It’s lacking a second thumbstick but they claim it’s because they wanted compatibility with older games and with the PSP-3000 which is still on sale. They finally killed UMD, which makes this device dependent on memory stick storage, which works fine for me since I didn’t want to be messing around with physical media on my portable device to begin with. Then there’s smaller bite size games for the platform called PSPminis that will provide instant entertainment in manageable portions for my daily commute.

It’s everything I wanted in a handheld… A year ago.

The thought of walking around with two devices seriously makes me ill. I was finally able to stop carrying my computer around when I bought my iPhone, and the amazing app community that has rallied around the device is seriously remarkable. I would love a device that does both. Plays serious video games and is also my personal communications hub. The N-Gage had it right, only that it did both things poorly. The iPhone on the other hand is slowly getting there. They perfected the personal communications and then allowed the developers to build games for it and extend it’s platform. Sony still has an opportunity to get into the market though since the iPhone’s biggest drawback for gaming is it’s lack of a physical control mechanism. And while I would love for it to have a phone built in, I’m sure the limitation is battery life, hell, I get terrible battery life from my iPhone when playing Peggle, I don’t even want to know what would happen with a 3D action/adventure platformer.

At the end of the day it’s all about the games though. And of the thousands of games that the iPhone has, most are worthless. If you want a really fleshed out game the iPhone has yet to crack that market. The PSP is getting Metal
Gear Solid Peacewalker and Parasite Eve 3, I need to play those games. It really sucks that they scrapped the UMD to download program, but there’s still talks of something being worked on and I’m confident they understand just how important it is for them to figure this out.

So in conclusion, I’m going to finally buy a PSP this year to keep at the office, the PSPGo might just be that PSP. Pricing was not aggressive at all so Im sure it’ll come down some soon or the retailers will start bundling games with it.

All in all, great job Sony! Other than the pricing, the PSPGo is in my opinion the best PSP they could have built while maintaining good battery life and backwards compatibility.

I am a few days late on this one but i have a very good excuse. Testing the headphones has been harder than originally anticipated. The guilty party here? Apple iPhone 3G.

However I do have some comments about the headphones and I would like to share them with all of you even though I think that it is a bit sad that my review didn’t go as well.

The Good

The headphones have a bit of weight to them in the earbuds but not too much and if you use the correct headphone plug they will fit very tightly and not fall off easily. The box also brought a clip so you can clip the cable to the back of your shirt just in case it does fall. The clip is a bit weak though so consider it a precaution more than a true solution.

The cable between the earbuds is quite sturdy and the jewel case is quite stylish.

Jogging with the headphones is very possible and I have not had any problems at all. Running should not be much of a problem but Im honestly not that much of a runner.

The battery life is adequate for its size but I have managed to get the low battery warning at least once every 2-3 days, and they have died on me once. I have a 1 hour commute to and from work, which makes for 2.5 hours of use guaranteed use every day and whatever else is during lunch or something. This is not exactly a problem but going a weekend without charging the device, is impossible.

The Possibly Bad

I have been having intermittent connection problems with the headphones. Also I have been having problems with the video/sound sync when watching podcasts. I say this is possibly bad because I am thinking that it might not be the complete fault of the headphones. Let me explain myself.

The breaking up normally happens when my phone is in my pocket and I am walking. It happens every few seconds but it is not a regular interval. Picking up the phone and just holding it in my hand fixes this as long as I am not swinging my hands that much. After searching around I found this which is exactly what I thought was happening :

My thinking is the CPU can barely handle the iPod and Bluetooth at the same time, so when you start moving the iPhone around it has to track the accelerometer movements and puts it over the top. (link)

I decided to take this and run with it. Since I have a jailbroken iPhone 3G I downloaded the Rotation Inhibitor. This has really made a significant impact on the breaking up problem. I have been using it for 2 days with it so I will most likely update this article when I get a bit more data.

The Audio/Video sync problem I have found that if i disconnect the headphones (turn them off) and then turn them back on they normally sync up well. They lose sync if they switch between stereo-bluetooth and normal headset bluetooth for phonecalls. It is kind of random and odd, I honestly think this is something that can be fixed through software soon. The sync has so far not happened when using the headphones with my MacBook Pro, so again I am blaming the iPhone 3G for this.

The Bad

Sony, in their infinite wisdom, decided that instead of using a standard Mini-USB plug so that you could charge through your computer and be able to charge them at any moment, people would enjoy a proprietary new plug. The plug is actually the standard Sony Ericsson phone plug cut in half. When I went to ask for this plug at the Sony Style at the local mall, the guy said were a small store we cant carry everything. So they make a proprietary plug and they dont even sell it. I am currently considering getting the full plug off of ebay for the office.

There is no way to plug the headphones in to charge while you are using them. This is not really much of a problem… but its just kind of lame.

The Bottom Line

I am not going to lie and say that I was not disappointed when the sound started breaking up or when the movies audio was not in sync. But honestly the liberty of not having to deal with large headphones make these the best form factor ever. They are light and small and they can be just stowed away in a pocket at a moments notice.

Considering I paid $110 for the V-Moda Vibe Duos and those lasted for about a year because of my very tough use of headphones I think that these will really last for a while just for the fact that I do not have to plug/unplug them and they wont be jerked around by the iPhone on my pocket. Im quite certain Ill get quite the mileage out of these.

I am happy with my purchase and I have been showing them off to everybody since not only are they awesome, they also dont look silly by having large pieces for no apparent reason or not being a large DJ style headset either. Both of these things are very important to me and the HBH-IS800Z delivers… Now if only I could get the iPhone to work nicely with them!

Where To Buy

If you go to the Sony Style store (sonystyle.com) you will end up paying $179.99. This is better than going to the Sony Style store at your local mall where they are asking for $199.99 for them. Amazon.com still wins though, they are currently listing them for $121.99 (link). I purchased them at Amazon.