OK, other than the small number which will no doubt be attributable to stupidity, why should there be any PS3s that get ‘bricked’. This is a closed system. More closed than Apple with the Mac. Updates, unless interrupted by a power outage, loss of connection, or act of God should not have problems.

Or else they all should.

Sure, there are different revision levels, but they are all instituted by Sony. It is not like putting a SCSI card in a home computer and finding that it tramples the extended BIOS of some other card. This is a case of Sony not being careful – period.

Hopefully, the people with ‘bricked’ units will not get the third degree from Sony when trying to return them for proper updating.

from Betanews

Just hours after making it publicly available, Sony has pulled the PlayStation 3’s latest firmware download (v2.40) due to reports of inoperable consoles after the update process.

SCEA’s director of Corporate Communication and Social Media, Patrick Seybold, played down the problem, saying that incoming calls regarding failures have been of a low volume, and the removal is only temporary.

If incidents are in any way reflected by the voluminous message board chatter on the subject, it has only affected a fraction of users. Of the hundreds of posts reporting v2.40 update status for Playstation.blog readers, only several dozen posted system failures, and conditions surrounding those were somewhat inconsistent.

The worst outcome that several users have reported is a PS3 that simply does not boot after upgrading. One user said, “I tried to update to v. 2.40 this morning. Probably around 10:30 or 11:00 PST. It rebooted and left me hanging on the screen with the squiggly wave lines. It did not make it to the XMB. Upon calling Sony, I unplugged the machine. I plugged it back in. I restarted it. I held down the power button until it turned red again. Then I repowered the machine. Now I don’t even get to the wavy squiggly line screen. I just get a black screen.” Several other users reported the same.

The firmware update added several notable features, most prominent of which is the ability to access the XMB operating system screen while playing PS3 software. It also added an Internet search command that does not first require an open browser, and a new “trophy collection,” which lists all the user’s objective-based trophies collected from games which support that feature.

Some users who reported successful installs, however, report issues with these new features, claiming that attempts to access the XMB in-game or check their trophy collection both result in frozen systems — but nothing as serious and incurable as a bricked PS3.

Sony has said it is “working diligently to isolate the problem…and to identify a solution before we put the firmware back up.” In the meantime, some users have taken the matter into their own hands, removing and reformatting their PS3 drives at the expense of their previously saved games.

Again, where is the quality control? It’s not as if the people who write the code have no access to Play Station 3s and are guessing it will work. Sony should repair any problems without charge, and refund and shipping charges to the people affected.

Then they should perform some other act of contrition, something not too expensive for them, but also something that costs something – people like that, and it will stick in the minds of those who let this happen.

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Quote of the day:

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. - Andre Gide

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