I did some more messing around last night and I believe I have found something else not mentioned.
Remote Play has lost a good deal of its lag. Previously attempting Remote Play found a near half second lag in response. There was some form of latency issue, even when connecting directly to the PS3 as the wireless connection point. For slower paced games it wasn't an issue. I could steal play High Stakes Poker or even frustrate my way through PJ Monsters. I prefer testing on PS1 games, as there is a larger variety of those to test with. Medieval and other action/adventure titles could be done after you adjust. Platformers like Crash Bandicoot were OK until you hit levels where you were riding on something fast and had to time jumps or had to run toward the screen from a rolling boulder. You have less than a second of reaction time and the lag would result in your death. Racing games (I was using Rally Cross) were just unplayable. PS1 racers had a lot of pop-up graphics due to system constraints and that combined with the PSP's tiny screen meant half a second was disastrous.
So, for me the lag would not be acceptable until a racing game was playable via Remote Play. Last night I was able to play Rally Cross with just a minor amount of lag. The latency is short enough that it just felt like a sluggish car, not one that visibly reacted long after I pushed a button. It's not perfect but it is definitely doable now.
I also noticed that using any form of Internet connection from remote play, either through the browser or the PlayStation Store, was not noticeably delayed during Remote Play, which I had seen before.
With that said, it occurred to me that when using Remote Play I am basically doing cloud computed gaming. This is doing what OnLive is saying they will do. So, while Sony just trademarked PS Cloud, they actually beat OnLive and everyone else to the remote gaming concept. So, now I wonder, could PS Cloud actually be a system for use with either a future PSP and/or console? Could it be a network designed for remote gaming from another PS3 on to your PS3? You go to a friend's house and you can now play your PSN games via their PS3 by just Remote Playing? Once it occurred to me that Remote Play is just an early version of cloud computed gaming the actual applications for a console became very large, and it seems that PS Cloud could be a great number of things.
I also believe I have come to a conclusion on what it is that bothers people with the new Friend's List sorting options.
First, is of course that we have become used to the old way, and the only people who immediately liked the change are the ones that didn't like the old way to begin with.
But I think I see more to it than just this. I have noticed people in other places, like the PlayStation Blog, who wanted a change even say they didn't like losing the original layout. Why?
The key is that we are naturally predisposed to be attracted to symmetry and order. A room that appears cluttered, but has everything you need easily accessible, is less appealing than an organized room that requires you to dig into cabinets or other storage units to find things. Something completely utilitarian has only moderate appeal if it doesn't look appealing.
The old system had online friends sorted alphabetically with offline friends below that sorted alphabetically. It had a sense of symmetry. It wasn't true symmetry as that would require exactly half of your friends online. But it did have a sense of order and symmetry.
The two new options are:
1) Alphabetical - this has zero symmetry. It has a utilitarian purpose, but due to online and offline friends having a different look through both color and information presented up front it appears to just be a jumbled mess. It is actually easier to find a person when you aren't concerned with them being online, but from a purely visual stand point you just have blue and red dots randomly scattered through the list. This is your messy room.
2) Online status and time sense last online - It appears to have symmetry, but the moment you go into offline names all organization is purely at the whim of the friends on your friends list. It is like walking into an organized room (online status) but then looking for a screwdriver in a junk drawer (offline status) where things are just taken in and out and jumbled up based purely on what the last item used was. The junk drawer serves a purely utilitarian purpose and hat you want is easily found, but unless you have been watching precisely what people have been taking out and putting into it the initial look will be a jumbled mess.
The old system was the equivalent of finding an organized room where everything is hung up where it belongs and opening a drawer finds dividers that sort each item into a place that immediately makes sense when you look at it (think toolbox).
So, none of these things make it impossible to do what you want to do, but the aesthetic appeal is not present in the new options.
So, the question is why does it matter? Because of our own human nature. We live in a world where millions are spent on designing packaging and labels to appeal to our aesthetic nature. How many changes have soda bottles and cans gone through over the last 20 years? Ever notice that diet and caffeine free products use the same color scheme among all brands? Heck, even regular flavored soda comes in red, blue, or some variation of the two, colored packaging (at least in the US).
Does Sony care about aesthetics? They must, as for two consoles now they have made an effort to assure everything is black, allowing only special edition things to be other colors (again, focusing on my US experience), as that makes them stand out as special.
So, why did this lack of aesthetic appeal not get caught in testing? Simple, testing is done on special test machines on special test, and probably management, accounts. There is a very high likelihood that these were mostly all online at the same time, causing the handful that were offline to not stand out as much. And then they were likely just testing for bugs, and this is free of bugs.
