What Are You Hoping For From PS3 FW 4.0?

As PlayStation 3 owners lament yet another recent, apparently pointless firmware update, perhaps it’s time to look beyond minor bug fixes and ‘security updates’ and – somewhat whimsically and hopefully – look ahead to what Sony are working on for the next major point release: firmware 4.0.

Four’s a weighty number.  It seems to warrant a fanciful command, a sense of purpose – but let’s be honest, the PlayStation 3 has been caught in a kind of cat and mouse cycle with hackers and insignificant patches for a while now, the developers seemingly unable to really push forward with the kind of innovation that brought us DTS over Dolby, or proper upscaling, or – yes – the rather backwards removal of OtherOS.

Hey, at least people were talking about 3.21 (the infamous Geohot response that saw Sony strip out Linux, raising a middle finger to those that wanted to keep their alternative operating system and play online) – who really knows what’s happened with the last three or four?  Well, apart from you.

[drop2]The first one is obvious – Vita.  Sony’s big black hope isn’t that far away in Japan (releasing at the beginning of December) and it wouldn’t take a massive leap of faith to assume that Sony have something planned to coincide with the new portable.

What that might be is anyone’s guess, but we’d wager that a shift in the way the XMB (the PS3’s user interface) is laid out to more closely match that of Vita is a given.  Naturally there’s no touch screen controls, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see enhanced launch pages for PS3 first party stuff like the Vita has, for starters.

And then there’s the cross platform play, and the ability for the Vita to act as a remote play device.  Sure, it’s embryonic just now, but it’s coming – whether or not this feature requires a firmware update on the PS3 side is anyone’s guess.

We’ve heard rumours that there might be an option to skin the Vita’s UI the other way though, to make it more closely resemble that of the PS3’s floaty curves and simple plus-shaped approach.  I’ll be honest, I don’t really care much for the bubbles currently messing up the Vita’s fancy touch screen, so if I can change them then all the better.

Some things are a given, though – at some point at least.  PlayStation Suite compatibility must be in the pipeline – why would a service that looks set to really ignite Android and Vita skip over the PS3?  It won’t, not in my opinion anyway.  Cross platform functionality seems key just now in Sony’s plan, so don’t be surprised to see PS Suite games and applications making their way over to the PlayStation 3.

Look out for a new browser, too – well overdue and surely not that big an issue for Sony to finally ditch the tired old Netfront web application and head for something a little more modern and standards compliant.  We’d be hoping for something running Webkit but – really – anything will do.

Other things are probably just wishful thinking – we’d love for Trophies to automatically sync like they do on the 360 (which is probably never going to happen) and we’d kill for proper, full game installs rather than the slightly piecemeal and unpredictable amounts we normally endure everytime we throw in a new PS3 game.

But what are you hoping for?  PlayStation 2 games on the Store?  Dreamcast games?