Firmware 2.80 Required For VidZone

Lots of people have speculated, including us, about what the latest PlayStation 3 firmware update actually did.  The update, which took the PS3 to system software version 2.80, arrived at the end of June but came without a meaningful change-log or anything resembling concrete information from Sony other than the fact that it helped stability in certain software, the usual company line for “it’s a secret, work it out yourselves.”

Which, last night, it seems, I did.  Coming back from our usual pizza/Sagres combo and after being royally thrashed by Noel and his stupid red boxes on the quiz machine, we fired up VidZone.  Oh, there’s an update, excellent, we’ll all sit around and watch a black screen whilst the PS3 crawls into service.  Thankfully, that didn’t take too long, but then we were prompted with the dreaded firmware update screen too – we couldn’t continue with VidZone until we’d updated the PlayStation 3 to version 2.80.

See, I hadn’t updated my home PS3 to the latest firmware because I was waiting on something like this – I wanted to know what it did and why it was an optional upgrade for the first time since the machine launched – and now I know: whatever’s new in Firmware 2.80 was required for VidZone’s latest update. And thus I’m now all patched up to 2.80 – after waiting about 25 minutes for the damned thing to download, of course.  But hey, I now have a slightly faster Trophy compare feature too.  Smashing.