Three Speech were invited along to PlayStation’s London HQ for a quick glimpse of the finished article. A few of the features we were able to take a look at were as follows:

As well as the standard view screen, you are able to view your photographs scattered across a virtual landscape. This function allows you to pan over the images, zoom in and out, 360 degrees. Not as gimmicky as it sounds, we were truly impressed with this feature. A 48 inch HD TV also helps!

The Mission Impossible III movie was loaded up for us to take a look at the Blu-ray function on the PS3. Shoddy movie, but again, it looked highly impressive.

The music function on the PS3 allows for all of your music to be instantly transferred (meta data and all). Much like iTunes you can flick through your music, using album covers to guide your way.

The video functionality appeared to be incredibly straight forward, as the EyeToy was plugged into the USB port and immediately sprung into action. With an HD camera coming into play next year and the PS3’s online capability, we’ll be interested to see how this is used as a communication device.

It seems your hands-free headset for your mobile phone can be connected and registered via Bluetooth to the PS3. Does this really mean hands-free, video conferencing over the internet?

Having loaded up several films to the PS3 we were able to view them concurrently as thumbnails showing live footage from where you left off looking at the full screen. We were then able to skip from film to film with instant access, so none of that frustrating waiting for films to load. More a neat trick than a serious feature, perhaps, but one that really ups the ‘wow’ factor.