PS3 Home on track for autumn

Whilst Sony works on ironing out the ongoing problems with its recent significant update to PS3, PSN director Eric Lempel has said that the autumn arrival of Sony’s social network Home is on track and will be a full-blooded, non-beta release.

Previously, PSN’s Susan Panico had stated the Home’s rollout would be managed along the same lines as Gmail, where an open beta service is launched and then refined over time.

However, speaking to Next-Gen, Lempel stated: The Home open beta is still on schedule for release later this fall. If you think about Gmail and Susan’s reference, Gmail when it launched in beta was a fully functional email service. I personally was using it and it offered everything you’d expect, but was in beta just to say that there’s more to come and maybe it’s not fully polished.

The reason we’ve been delaying Home is so that we can deliver a high quality service that the users will enjoy. Even though it will be in beta, it will be a fair representation of what the service can be and its potential, so it won’t be a 0.5 release, it will be a fully robust service.”

Lempel also spoke of Sony’s upcoming movie downloads service, saying: I don’t have any more specifics right now, but it will go live in the US this summer and I think it will offer consumers everything they’re looking for from us. It will offer everything they expect from us and probably a little bit more.”