No word yet on whether the new design for the PlayStation 3's online store will be coming to North America or other parts of the globe, but, today, Eurogamer has coverage of what Europe is getting.
UPDATE: Sony tells Kotaku that the new store will be available on U.S. PS3s on October 23.
UPDATE 2: ... and to Canada on 10/23, too!
They say this new PSN store is snazzy and works really well.
Two key excerpts:
Sitting through a demo at Sony's London HQ, the new store's clean and elegant. The blue background has been replaced with a kind of smoked glass grey, and the font is bold and non-fancy and owned by Sony itself apparently, even if everyone had temporarily forgotten what it was called when I asked. Tiles are gone, and there are huge Microsoft Metro-styled pictures for the main content instead, and that stuff takes up roughly three quarters of the screen, I'd say.
and..
And what of good old Search? Completely overhauled. The onscreen keyboard has been dialled back, and instead you get a column with all the letters in the alphabet, a bit like with the 360. It searches the whole word - MAS returns Mass Effect just above Tiger Woods: The Masters - and it can cope with spelling mistakes and abbreviations. It will bring up Modern Warfare 3 if you search for "MW 3". Selections all have clear tags, too, listing whether you're looking at a game or a movie, and while you can hunt directly for an add-on item by name,
Lots more at Eurogamer. The new store goes live on PS3s on October 17, presumably in Europe. We're waiting on a reply from Sony's American division to find out if/when it's coming out here.
Settling the Stores: The PlayStation Store Makeover [Eurogamer]