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Sony has launched a new web site titled "Open Platform for PlayStation 3". At the moment however, the site is virtually blank, only displaying a cryptic message stating:

"PLAYSTATION®3 allows any desired third-party system software to be installed on it besides its system software provided by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Details will be posted on this site soon."

The appearance of this site further supports that Sony will open up their latest console to third party home brew. However, it remains to be seen how far Sony will let hobbyists divulge into their new system.

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In an unpublished interview with Official PlayStation Magazine UK (published on Three Speech), Phil Harrison was asked whether PS3 users would be able to download files from any website on the internet using the PS3's built in web browser.

?No. It has to be done through the store. Although it?s built on the same technology as the open internet browser, it?s a special version. That?s completely understandable from a DRM [digital rights management] point of view. But some streaming sites, such as music on MySpace, will work.?

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We know that the PS3 can surf the Net thanks to the included browser on the Cross Media Bar, but just how fully featured is the web application? We took our retail PS3s out for a spin on the Web to see if there were any hiccups that users might run into with their new systems.

One thing that we discovered is that while the PS3 can open up and display multiple browser windows, you can easily run out of memory if you access pages that are media or plug-in heavy. At one point, we tried loading up the IGN homepage, followed by Ifilm and ESPN, and promptly received a message stating that the console was out of memory for the browser application. This forced us to close a window so we could continue our web surfing. We did find that connecting a USB keyboard and mouse was infinitely easier to use than the standard keypad that was brought up by the browser, so if you're planning on doing a lot of web surfing with your system, you may want to look at disconnecting these two peripherals, which work as soon as you plug them in.

We also discovered that while the PS3 has extremely limited plug-in support. While the homepage of the console is set to Playstation.com, Flash rotations on that site runs much slower than that on a normal computer. We're guessing that's because the PS3 has an outdated version of Flash included in the system software; sites that use the latest Flash plug-ins, like Ifilm to help deliver trailers and movies, were rejected during browser use. What's more, we didn't find Quicktime or Windows Media plug-in support, so watching trailers on the Quicktime site or clips off our own site from the PS3 didn't work as well as we'd hoped.

Finally, we also discovered that there's a limited amount of support for downloading content from the Web to your PS3 via the browser. We weren't able to transfer a file from a website to the hard drive on the PS3 -- in this case, our footage of Motorstorm's intro; instead, we were prompted to select a location to save a file to on an external storage media, like a portable hard drive or thumb drive. What's more, if you want your PS3 to recognize this file, the folder it's placed in has to be in the same directory structure that the PSP or PS3 acknowledges or it will remain unknown to the system. What's more, the same limits on the Cross Media Bar for the PSP exist for the PS3: it only goes one level deep, so don't expect to lay files in a multiple folder-deep directory tree.

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