PS3 supports electronic money Edy with firmware 1.50 (in Japan)

O

one

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Edy is a prepaid rechargeable contactless smart card by Sony's FeliCa technology. With the firmware 1.50 PS3 can use Edy cards or an electronic wallet in a cellphone via a USB contactless IC card reader/writer "PaSoRi" (approx. $30) for payments in Japanese PS Store, in addition to credit cards. Other updates for the 1.50 firmware are not much interesting, a new sound option for the menu, removal of backup data, WEP128/WPA-PSK/WPA-PSK(AES) support, choice for how to save password/sign-in, Korean keyboard, and backward compat updates.

http://www.jp.playstation.com/info/release/nr_20070123_ps3_150.html
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20070123/sce.htm
sce1.jpg
 
What is the point of something like that in your home? The PS3 stores your credit card information anyway.

Edit: Oh nevermind it's pre-paid. Makes more sense.
 
The wallet phone was really pushed by DoCoMo, I remember reading several Datamonitor reports on it. What is the level of FeliCa use like in Japan today?
 
I guess this is only really useful for parents with kids. Otherwise the credit card based wallet system works just fine.

A lot of Japanese kids who don't have their own credit cards do have Osaifu Keitai mobile phones or can easily get access to an Edy card from a convenience store. This could make it a lot easier for Sony to sell e-games to Japanese kids. But WTF is up with charging $30 for it? That thing should be free!

It's just so weird to have the equivalent of a coin slot connected to your home console. I am already imagining the horror of seeing "Swipe your Edy card to continue" in an online game.
 
If there is a way for people outside of Japan to get their hands on Edy it could be useful for buying things on the Japanese PSN store from abroad..
 
Nice to see the options to spend money improved over adding unneccessary stuff like background downloads or multitasking or image scaling. Perhaps that reserved SPE is needed to drive the masses of microtransactions Sony wants people to make?
 
Thats pretty interesting. Though I'd rather have those playstation cards they havent shipped to retailed yet. :(
 
Seems like you can also pick your personalization icon from a photo instead of using one of their 200 or whatever choices..

The second asterix point seems interesting?

" With 2 PS3 users to basic functional such as message switching in addition service, utilization of the online game, In addition you can enjoy the download and the like of the additional data of the game and the game. Below please refer to details"

which seems to imply to me that you can multi-task more, perhaps download in background, and send/receive messages in-game.
 
Wrt the backwards compatability updates, do we know what exactly is addressed in those?
 
xbd said:
Wrt the backwards compatability updates, do we know what exactly is addressed in those?
Click to expand...

They point to an query interface where you enter the game and it explains the current status. Other than that, I don't see any way of getting what new games were declared clean vs the last update.
 
1.5 firmware is up in NA now.

edit: it seems BC is fixed for non-480p games now. Games don't look like they have been through a shredder anymore. Tested with rouge galaxy demo and no problems to report. Can anyone else confirm? :D

edit2: confirmed by many on other forums. :)
 
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The 1.50 firmware does indeed seem to fix the major image quality issues with backward compatibility. The half-dozen PS2 games I tried don't exhibit the nearest-neighbour scaling artifacts like they did with earlier firmware.

I also found that if you select 480p as a supported display mode, the PS3 will scan-convert 480i PS2 games to 480p, but not very well. The image quality is much better if I disable 480p as a supported display mode, have the PS3 thus output the PS2 game in 480i and let my TV do the scan conversion to 480p or 960i (a Sony XBR specific mode). This is particularly beneficial for 480i 60fps games.

Phat
 
Wow I tested too. Games look fine in non-progressive mode now. I wonder what the solution was and how why it was not fixed before launch.

The only other change I saw was being able to change your icon picture to anything custom image you have in your pictures folder.

I don't know why the Edy icon shows up in mine since I don't have the reader but it does. The icon is ugly and breaks the artistic consistency of the XMB interface!
 
Onlooker1 said:
The second asterix point seems interesting?

" With 2 PS3 users to basic functional such as message switching in addition service, utilization of the online game, In addition you can enjoy the download and the like of the additional data of the game and the game. Below please refer to details"
Click to expand...
Is there any clarification on this?
 
I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet, but 1.5 also removes the "Display All" option under the different XMB sections. Now, when you insert removable media the entire directory structure is displayed. I've only tested that out for CDs, haven't tried USB storage devices yet, but I assume it would be the same.
 
I noticed when you playback a video clip there is now an option to choose a frame to use as the thumbnail for the clip.

Also noticed that in the XMB little thumbnail videos will start playing at the same time. All 8 visible thumbnails start playing without audio. I thought that was pretty cool.

 
Shifty Geezer said:
I thought you could select 10 seconds of video to be the thumbnail, which would also give you the static thumbnail. :???:
Click to expand...

This is why he points out the option to use an individual frame as a new feature in 1.5. ;)
 
What does that get you? You mean turn off motion clips and just use a static frame? To save space on the HDD? Otherwise to pick a static frame, don't you just choose that as the start of your motion clip?
 
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