I've spent much of today tinkering around with the non-gaming abilities of the Wii and PS3. I'll be posting more on other PS3 features and Wii media features later today, but for now I want to concentrate on the Playstation 3's media playback functions.

The Playstation 3 can playback a pretty impressive list of music, video and images through your television. Each are handled in different ways and with varying degrees of success.

Music: The Playstation 3 can playback CDs, ATRACs, MP3s, MP4s and Wave files from of USB devices and drives, Memory sticks, CF and SD memory cards. I pulled music off of both Memory sticks and Memory stick Duos as well as three different USB drives without much problem.

I saw much because it took a little digging to try and figure out why the PS3 wasn't initially finding content on non Memory sticks. It turns out that the default is for the console to look for specific folders (hello, PSP) when you insert any sort of storage device. But if, when you are in the music category on the cross media bar, you select the storage device with the triangle button it allows you to tell it to display all content. Then you can just browse through the folders and choose whatever you want.

It's not a big deal, but they probably should have made that the default option, and perhaps a future update will.

Once you've selected music you can transfer it to the harddrive, a quick and painless operation, or just play it immediately.

The system does have a visualizer, which is kinda cool, but not nearly as psychedelic as the Xbox 360's.

It took me awhile to figure out how to play music when I was browsing through the media bar, I initially thought this wasn't possible and was pretty annoyed. But then I discovered that you can hit the Playstation button and it brings you back to the menu without stopping the music.

While you can sort music and do shuffle play, it doesn't look like you can create playlists, which is a shame. You also can't stream music from your PC, which is another big bummer.

Video: This is a pretty cool feature that lets you play mpegs through the console. Again, you can access the files through USB devices or a plethora of memory cards. If you copy the videos over to your harddrive the thumbnails that appear under video will actually be little mini movies of the flick you have saved there. Kinda cool to see all of those running at the same time.

Pressing the Playstation button during playback will make the movie run in the background as you browse through the cross media bar, another neat feature.

Pictures: As with all media, you have plenty of ways to import pictures. Once they're in you have a couple of neat ways to look at them. You can just scroll through what's on the storage device using the right and left triggers. In this mode you can also rotate pictures clockwise and counter-clockwise using the R2 and L2 buttons. This is great for quick on the fly image viewing with out a lot of neck craning.

You can also view images individually. You can use the Playstation button while viewing a single image to make it the background, but unfortunately this is just temporary and there doesn't appear to be a way to permanently set a background image.

The coolest feature for images, by far, is the ability to browse through them as if they were physical pictures being spilled across a table. The effect is simply amazing, it really looks like someone is dumping your pictures onto a table. Of course it's sort of useless, but who cares? It's neat.

Overall, I like the PS3's media playback features, but it doesn't seem like a lot of thought was put into the usefulness of the features. I want to listen to music, but why can't I set it to play all of the time or have playlists? I want to be able to view images, but why can't I set them as backgrounds?

Fortunately, all of this should be pretty easy to add on. Updating the PS3 is easy and, like the PSP, I suspect it will be frequent. Brian Crecente