If you’ve ever wished you could find everything you need to start your day on your PLAYSTATION 3, Life with PlayStation give you one more reason to do so. This free service delivers a new way for you to utilize your PS3 to instantly access real-time news and information like weather updates from over 60 cities around the world.
Life with PlayStation provides a stunning interactive globe, a 3D world map that you can twirl around to see live cloud movement courtesy of the University of Wisconsin, combined with up-to-date weather information from the Weather Channel, top news headlines provided by Google news, and live web cam images via the Earth Television Network — all localized to the select city. And why not have your favorite soundtrack playing in the background while you go through your morning ritual (just think, no TV commercials and teasers to find out if you need to bring an umbrella to work)? You’re on your own for your morning caffeine fix.
For those following the progress of Hurricane Ike throughout last week, we were able to track the storm’s real-time movement from Life with PlayStation. (See the screenshots below)
We’re also really excited to share that this new lifestyle service is running in parallel with our Folding@home project. Essentially, this means that while you’re taking a stroll on Life with PlayStation, you’re automatically helping Stanford University to work towards curing diseases such as Alzheimer’s and various types of cancers. For those familiar with Folding@home, we’ve made some enhancements for more advanced simulations of protein folding and support for wider variety of simulations, in addition to adding a unique ranking system showcasing top contributors from around the world.
I’ve also put together a quick video demo to make sure you’re checking out all the new features here:
Life with PlayStation is now available for download by selecting the Folding@home icon under “Network” on the XMB. Give it a whirl, we look forward to reading your feedback.
I’ve been folding for about 3 months now, and I can’t wait to check out the new features. Kudos! Cheers!
Thanks and just want to say that you guys did a great job. My feedback is that it looks great and loads of info available, but on future update on this service it will be greatly appreciated if we have the option of selecting our own city, country as an add-on since all those info are already available on Google and the weather channel. just a though and thanks again and best regards…
Nice. Will download.
@Ghostm yes it is. No trophies yet, though very neat looking motorbikes and wonderful new events :-) Hail to Criterion ;-)
Keep on voting for Timesplitters 4 guys (free radical website under “polls”, PS3 is in the lead now :-D
Burnout Paradise bikes are available now!!!
Told you so :-P
COOL! BUT MY LIFE IS ALREADY PLAYSTATION!
AGAIN, GREAT JOB GUYS AND THANKS FOR MAKING IT FREE.
BTW, STILL HAVE’NT RECEIVE E-MAIL FOR SOCOM BETA.
LwP is very cool.
BUT I wish u will add some more cities in the future and change the languages in the different countries (german in germany, …)
But for the beginning it’s very coooooool !!!
But u must do a lot to make it perfect !!! (more cities, langueges, more aktuality, a bigger webcam pic)
Awesome Noam! One thing I think would be sweet for a future update to LWP is to be able to set a default location (opens that news page automatically and a wake up timer similar to the sleep timer (so our ps3 can wake us up with the news).
Otherwise this is a great addition to our free PSN.
oh man, i love what you did to it… now i can fold@home, and still check out the weather and what’s going on, on other country’s as well… this is great.. so if i want to travel or visit i’ll know what’s really going on in those country’s.. this is awesome… keep up the good work and feed back…
I don’t expect much response from this but wanted to post anyway.
I have been speaking to my boss about LwP (who is French) and he was saying it would be an interesting (and probably worthy) feature to include a sort of television service along with LwP. Basically, you could spin the globe to any country, check the weather, and then boot up the latest news program and actually watch the news.
Now I know a lot of people on here will say “Why do we need that, we already get the news” but if you think of it from a global standpoint, we have people from all over the world in the US and vice versa. It would be a great way for people to stay connected not only to local news but world news as well (and not just reading world news either). With the partnership with Google, I could see something like this happening and it would be very interesting I think.
Anyway, that my two cents. But I’ll definitely be checking this out tonight.
Finally. Went from no word to product! Better than a delay statement.
Great! I’m sitting in a hotel hundreds of miles away from home, and logging in to my PS3 through Remote Play on my PSP only to learn that this new “Life with Playstation” program has now taken over Folding@Home, and it is NO LONGER AVAILABLE THROUGH REMOTE PLAY. WTF?!?
Thanks a lot, Sony, for BREAKING my remote access to Folding@Home! #&%$@
FYI, I’m one of the rare people in Sony’s original target market for the PSP… a business person who travels for a living and actively uses the remote access features of my PSP and PS3. Normally I keep Folding@Home running all the time when I am out of town. But now that Folding@Home is integrated with LwP…. which is NOT ACCESSIBLE REMOTELY… Folding@Home is no longer available to me!
Sony, what were you thinking?!? I have no problem with adding individual features that can be used or turned off at the user’s discretion, but I have a REAL problem with adding features that BREAK EXISTING FEATURES.
And why was LwP not coded with Remote Play anyway? That’s one of the features you have been highly touting. Sometimes the impenetrable logic that you guys employ is completely mystifying to me, and I’m normally one of your biggest supporters.
So just to be clear about my needs… as a business traveler, Remote Access is more important to me than LwP, and F@H is more important to me that LwP. If you can’t figure out how to make these features available to me, then stop touting Remote Access as a feature and give me back my F@H without this alpha-stage crap integrated with it!
@ Razorbak86….
I don’t know if what I am saying is right…but…maybe hold on till you get back home…upgrade your PS3 and then the PSP will be able to have the features.
I have a feeling you have to do this on the PS3 as you’re just connecting remotely from the PSP right ?
Anyways,,,I gotta work…so maybe others can answer here…I’m still waiting for the PSP3000 to come out…only have the PS3 so far.
I like the new features. I really like the news features except it’s very difficult to read. You need to make it so that you can view the text more easily. The way it is now it’s very hard to read. The browser needs to be reconfigured to take better advantage of the HD platform. You should be able to read the text clearly.
i don’t see what the fuss is. I can’t see what my weather is, I can’t read any articles because I can’t zoom in, and the lag between selecting a story and trying to read it, is far too long. I appreciate the free service, but I can’t see myself using it all that much, when I can get the same effect, by clicking the home icon in my browser.
I think it’s very awesome i was wating for this service for a long time and it was better than i expected but why not all the countries are displayed
the real time cloud thing is pretty cool and hopefully this will get more people to fold.
Looks good for a starting point.
I feel Sony ought to give Google the SDK and a test machine and let them make Chrome and all the other Google apps into PS3 apps. A good browser with java and flash support, robust web, calendaring, chat, email…
And I think that it ought to be easy to increase the number of cities with weather and news. Google already has a sort stories by zip code. And so does the Weather channel. And I also feel it should preload the news and weather for your home city as it boots up, so you can sift through them quickly.
Further, I would like to be able to change the XMB wallpaper under the Life icon so it points to my city/country of choice, not Japan.
And it should have a friends display, where it overlays the poeple on my friends list, and I can read news and weather for their hometown so when i talk to them I can say “Hey, how was that storm you guys just had”?
This app is horrible. Come on Sony are you serious? Is this what you think improves the PS3. I am very disappointed that you would spend, god knows how much time and effort, on a serivce that really sucks. Very few cities in the U.S., too much lag on certain spots of news areas, and you cant zoom in on the internet browser. This is just a joke. It could actually be useful but the way it is now is a complete FAIL!!! Nice job guys, keep it up, no wonder were in last place.
@215
Relax man i think you have the answer to yoru own question. They would not remove the remote play feature, this is critical to the use of f@h. Most people don’t fold when they in front of their ps3. Wait until you get home load it up correctly then test out remote play.
I’ve been having the problem that I can’t connect to the server of F@H for a while and now that I installed Life it still won’t work. Is there any way to fix this?
@222
You need to just relax man, what were you expecting an overnight life changing experience? This has possibilities, and it has the potential to grow and evolve. I really think people like yourself forget that the PlayStation brand has become about an evolving experience that changes through out the life of hte hardware. Just look at the PSP, it isn’t the system it was 3 years ago. PS3 certainly isn’t the system it was 2 years ago.
At some point LwP will be something beyond what you imagined. Just like every other component of the PS3 and PSP.
This is just the beginning.
This is nice, but I have two problems.
1) I cannot zoom into the text on news pages like I can in the normal web browser. This is sorely needed.
2) Every time I exit Life with PlayStation, my console beeps three times and resets.
Would it be possible to add in stocks, system statistics, a multi channel radio, and a widget-type system?
THAT would be sweet.
Great App!
@61..What part of Mississippi do you live in? I’m in Ocean Springs on the coast. I’ve been trying to find some local PS3 owners.
I don’t like it…
The screen saver shows the time in 12 hours mode. I’ve specifically selected 24 hours mode in my PlayStation3 Settings, so I’d appreciate if the applications used this, and their programmers didn’t do lazy hardcoding.
Regarding the playback of music, it would great if the application would not only support local files, but also read files from UPnP servers — like the PS3 normally does.
And where do you get your list of cities from? Could you please make it configurable and let me add my own town? Other weather applications have a huge list of towns, and so should this (e.g. check the Clock application on Ubuntu).
The configuration of Folding@Home seems reduced yet more complicated.
PLEASE add in-game Media Server support. There’s nothing more that I desire than that.
For me Life has the issue that when I press R3 it zoom/focus on Rome while like said in the video, I should zoom to the country/city of you timezone set, which has not changed since I bought my PS3. I double checked a few minuted ago but still it focuses on Rome instead of Amsterdam.
I had installed firmware 2.43 the day before.
Thank you for more one FREE service Sony. Loved it.
*** May I propose an idea for a future update… ***
It would be nice to be able to add your own location and set it as home. As the news feed is basically a Google News search for a given location, I can’t see that this would be hard to integrate.
thanks for the service it looks great the only thing is we need more country/cites that its but thanks for the service
nice, thanks for this neat program, and i like that i can fold while i’m checking stuff…
it would be neat if the PS3 had an option to boot directly into LWP if you want..
thanks again!
:)
Now it’s time for me to find a blurb about home and then maybe that’ll get released soon…
dont’ know if this is a bug or not. after reading the google news. if you try to go to any section (google finance, google map) and try to type/change the text on the textbox.. LwP freezes. i guess LwP doesn’t like auto-complete-javescript feature that google has.
Awesome! What a great way to reward the University of Wisconsin for their participation by not including the city of Madison, WI in Life with Playstation. This is not what I was expecting. News and weather? 90% of people out there won’t be able to get actual news or whether that is relevant to them. Congratulations to everyone who lives in one of the 60 cities around the world, and especially to the people who live in one of the 12 cities in the United States. Still looking forward to a day where I can check to see if I need an umbrella on my Playstation like I was told I could. But I guess no one can really do that no matter where they live, because it only shows the current temperature, and not a forecast. I live in a city of 200,000+, the state capitol, and no support. What was the delay for? Was there only one city before or something? This should have been delayed for at least a year to add functionality. It is useless.
@215 (IceCold):
>> They would not remove the remote play feature, this is critical to the use of f@h. Most people don’t fold when they in front of their ps3. Wait until you get home load it up correctly then test out remote play. <<
With all due respect, you are simply wrong. I KNOW it doesn’t work with Remote Play, because the PSP interface says this progam is not available through Remote Play.
Ironically, it allowed me to do the F@H “upgrade” remotely, but now the newly combined program can no longer be accessed remotely. That’s a fact which is easily verified. Since you yourself admit that remote play is “critical to the use of f@h”, then I would hope that you would try it yourself before telling me I’m wrong.
@arlyn-
i’m sure they will be working on adding more cities and functionality as time goes on…(hopefully)….my town isn’t included either!
until then you can still use the PS3 browser to go to google news and set up a personalized news page for your hometown and whatever interests you..
peace
@213
Great idea as long as bandwidth isn’t a concern for Sony. This would give Americans access to truly honest news castings. I know this isn’t the place to bash, but really makes me shake my head when all news corps in the states are owned by private entities. This means they can put whatever they want and call it news. Just look at CNN and Fox news…jebus! Sorry but when freedom of press was created the US government forgot to setup a law to protect a news corp. Canada has CBC which is government protected. They don’t answer to anyone but themselves.
So basically saying that you are on to something great. More information means a lot less ignorance in the world.
Kudos
Thank you Sony for a new feature that is free, and benefits the Folding Home project. Well done. The feature could do with a Zoom function for text.
@213
@241
Both of you make excellent points about including a variety of news sources. Life with PlayStation has a lot of potential, and will be greatly improved with different worldwide news feeds. Certainly the BBC would participate and most other public news companies would participate. LwP not being tied to any one media group would enhance the appeal across the different worldwide markets.
Dont worry, im sure we will see that Life with PlayStation WILL expand to provide more channels.
נועם!! כל הכבוד על התפקיד המכובד בסוני! עלה והצלח!
Noam! Shalom from ISRAEL!
My question for you, btw, is why can’t I use Life with PS WITHOUT activating folding@home? Can’t we seperate the two?
Thnx
@Razorback..
One thing…that was the old Folding right ?
Now with Life….Folding is inside as part of Life…so maybe just a different way to connect.
I know I saw lots of extra features today on Life that I didn’t see on Folding, but like I said before…I still don’t own a PSP, but wondering if it’s not somewhere in Life that may have changed and until you set up your PS3 with the new Life and Folding….it won’t work.
Not sure,,,but I’d still investigate all the new features in it on the PS3, try stuff and let the others here know…
I’m sure your comments if you find a way to do it, would be greatly appreciated by other PSP owners.
Who knows..we just may also get a reply or fix soon for this.
I also wanted to ask others if they see in bottom right hand corner Weather provided by the Weather network ?
I know on my local news in Canada…they only show major cities and then later…you have your own city come up, but that’s within the city. It may be the way the Weather channel is outputting it and nothing to do with Sony or Stanford.
Thanks sony for the update, but canadians seem to be getting the short end of the stick. Why is our capital not even on the list? Not trying to complain just trying to understand. Thanks again
@239
No, you are wrong. I’m using it right now.
Please add more cites or I won’t have a use for it. also the zoom option when reading websites would be nice inside Life with Playstation.
@152:
FFS, am I the only one that bothered to figure this program out before coming here to whine about it? You want to control your music? Press square twice.
Christ’s sake…….
remote play works fine if u upgrade it when u r in remote play it not lettin u upgrade the second time but it works fine.we need zoom plz and google earth be grate too i would love that and thank u sony 4 L.W.P
@ EvoAnubis…
Agreed…people have to read the stuff first.
Seems many just want others to advise what to do…..
Not sure what it is but I see it constantly on many blogs….comments and then someone says did you actually read the blog ? It states it in there.
Oh well…
Wow! That was a very pleasant surprise. I’ll download this the moment I get back from lecture today. Look very impressive, and, dare I say (for I am surrounded by rabid Nintendo fanboys), much better than the “equivalent” service on the Wii. Thank you very much for the update, and for taking such excellent care of your system and customers even well after the launch.