This is Living?

Sony released an update for the PlayStation 3 last night that incorporates the Folding@home application into a new feature called Life with PlayStation. At the moment, Life with PlayStation is a little dull (can't wait for that to be quoted out of context!) In addition to the Folding@home stuff, which now runs in the background whenever Life with PlayStation is running, there's now a Live channel. This gives you a view of the planet with real-time weather data provided by the Weather Channel. You can swing around the globe and zoom in on specific cities, where you'll see a live webcam shot of the city, current weather, and a handful of region-specific news articles provided by Google News.

It looks slick, kind of like an HD version of the Wii's weather channel, rolled up with the Wii's news channel, though it's got a few issues. I noticed that there were much fewer cities to get weather data for than in its Wii counterpart, and even then there's no weather forecast data. The interface is a little weird, requiring you to hold the square button to bring up a context menu that lets you flick from one channel to the next. Still, it looks like there's room for more channels, which makes me somewhat hopeful about future Life with PlayStation updates, because the main problem with Life with PlayStation so far is that it doesn't feel particularly new or distinct, it just feels like Sony is cribbing from Nintendo verbatim (now there's your bias-packed quote!)

Personally, I'd like to see some of the podcast and RSS features found in the PSP duplicated on the PlayStation 3, though I'm not sure if this is the place for it. What sort of functionality would you like seen added to Life with PlayStation?