Sony Announces Something, ANYTHING (Updated Again!)

For almost a week now, the Playstation Network (PSN) has not been working.  The online infrastructure was apparently hacked by someone and Sony decided that the best course of action was to shut it down entirely.

I'm not effected by this whole thing since I don't have a Playstation 3 for a variety of reasons, the first and foremost being that they were stupidly expensive when they first came out and the people who run Sony seem like they have a stick in thier collective asses.  Microsoft and Nintendo have a sense of wonder and fun about them, but Sony is like that filmmaker who feels that thier mediocre body of work is way more important than trying to do anything fun with it.

It got better when they started doing the commercials with Kevin Butler, but  it seemed like any time any announcements are made, it has no life, no excitement.  It's as if they are more in love with the products that they produce and the fans should just accept what they do.

A prime example of how poorly the company regards thier customers has been the launch of the Playstation Move.  It was quietly released and generated very little excitement in my opinion as I had no idea that it was even being released until the day I saw it on store shelves. 

In contrast, when the Kinect was released, Microsoft SHUT DOWN TIME SQUARE to throw a dance party.

With all of that said, it’s really of no surprise to me as to how poorly Sony is treating this PSN outage with nearly zero transparency as to what is going on with their network.  Now there are millions of people who haven’t been able to use this service for five days and counting, but has Sony given us information about when the service will be back up?  Will people get refunds for the outage that pay for the PSN Plus service or  DC Online?  How about  personal information?  Should we report the cards we use as stolen?

The answer, of course, is that they  haven’t said.

Normally, I wouldn’t even worry about this, but what Sony DID decide to announce is almost insulting in my opinion.

Sony has announced plans to release a Playstation branded tablet.

Huh?

Does anyone really WANT another hat thrown in the tablet arena?  Apple seems to have a pretty good grasp of this market, and I’m sure HP, Motorola, RIM, and all of the others out there creating these devices will do a fine job as well, but why announce the release of a product that no one expected, wanted, and named for a product line that currently has a terrible ongoing issue?

As the axiom goes, time will tell, but I don’t see this tablet business going anywhere and I feel that this was a limp attempt to distract from the horrible ongoing troubles the PSN is having.

UPDATED
On Twitter Jason Evangelho of the incredible site www.videogamewriters.com pointed out that Xperia Play is a separate division from the division who are developing the tablet.  I'm not changing the content of the article since I still think this was poor timing, but it definitely should be noted.

UPDATED AGAIN!

Sony has finally told everyone what is going on and it's not good.

The shorthand is that on April 20, 2011, Skynet hackers infiltrated the PSN and made off with a lot of your personal information including your name, address, phone numbers, passwords, and any other information you may have given to Sony.  Sony says that they don't know if credit card information was stolen yet, but what hacker can get all of your information and tell himself to have the restraint not upload your account info?

What that means to PSN users is that if they had that info in there, you may want to monitor your accounts and change all of your passwords.

You can see the official Sony response by clicking here.

PlayStation 3 120 GB
Xbox 360 4GB Console with Kinect