Downloading Littlebigplanet Karting last night I noticed a few changes since the last maintenance and firmware update.

The few changes:

• added a progress bar for when selecting background downloading
• Overall download speeds have increased
• they eliminated the "slow start" for background downloads (previously the first 10MB downloaded would be at a slower decreased rate then once the 10MB is reached the download speeds up to regular speeds)
• Downloading updates has been speed up substantially! I have never experienced a stable 4MB/s download when updating a game/app on the PS3.

Here is a graph of the download speeds I had during the updating of Littlebigplanet Karting.

But does it brick the console this time?

4.45 bricked my system and I haven't noticed any improvements with 4.46 (although I wasn't looking for them) but I will check it out tonight when I start downloading stuff.

I hope this is true. It would be smart for Sony to start scaling their network functions upward in anticipation of the PS4. Even smarter that they are giving away BF3 which will lead to a spike in downloads and online play.

Seems like the previous firmware was only causing issues for older model PS3s that have been upgraded to certain model hard drives, and it was fixed by downloading a new firmware update to a USB key, booting the PS3 into safe mode and upgrading it from there, fairly simple from what I understand.

By opening up their system to non-proprietary upgrades, it definitely makes it harder to account for all possible issues that might come up with a firmware update, but I think it's safe to say I would rather have Sony offer the option to throw my own hard drive in than force me into a pre-packaged proprietary hard drive that's 2-3 times more expensive than it should be.