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From Dust is rolling onto the PlayStation Network a little sooner than expected, actually a lot sooner than expected, moving up two weeks from its September 27th release date to today the 13th.

Sony may think their Network is more secure now, and their Store is ready for action, but when you have to post a FAQ to help people access and download the Welcome Back games and movies you are giving them to make them feel better about the 25 days of downtime your systems had, you have failed, and failed miserably. The Store is throwing cryptic error numbers all over the place, the litany of comments on the Blog post are complaining about people selecting titles but being unable to download them, and also includes follow-ups from Sony reps on how to get at and download their chosen titles them from various other menus and locations in the system.

To me this is just crappy programming. They had a whole month to get ready for anything -- load issues, security issues, anything, and still, STILL this pile of crap Store software throws ridiculous looking Error codes instead of doing any of the following when under heavy traffic:
* let users opt to enter a queue to access the page or start the download
* make a server-side queue of downloads just like on those PC download sites
* just say it's fricken busy and to try back later! NOT SOME ERROR 0x234987sd#$*(@ nobody is going to understand!

The PlayStation Network Welcome Back program is now live, according to the Blog. You do have a full month to redeem your two free PS3 games and two free PSP games, but time is of the essence to use selected PlayStation Store free movie rentals this weekend only. Once again in case you missed it the first time around, the PS3 games you can get are:
* Dead Nation

The Xperia Play phone has finally made it through Verizon's approval process and is set to land at retail on May 26th. Pre-orders for the unofficial PlayStation Phone open on Verizon's site on the 19th. The Xperia Play will be launching with a slate of free titles bundled in, and I've seen more than a few games announced as exclusives on the phone so there could be some momentum kicking in for the new platform. But as someone already on contract with big red, there's nothing in the Play to make me think of paying full price for a new smartphone.

The bundled in titles are Madden NFL 11, Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline, The Sims 3, Star Battalion, Crash Bandicoot and Tetris.

The Android world marches on, of course, and the same day it launches the Droid X2 may be launching on Verizon as well, toting a dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2 display with a high resolution screen and the Gingerbread flavor of the OS. For owners of the Droid X like me, this would be what I would go after if I were getting a new phone, even if we're not sure if it'll be the same $199 as the Xperia Play when it launches.

One small consolation for Android owners like myself is that with the launch of the Xperia Play and X2 also comes the launch of Gingerbread on Verizon's network. This could mean that updates for the Droid 2 and Droid X to this latest OS might not be far off.

Hit the jump for the full press release on the Play.

I'm not one to throw stones at service outages -- computer systems will have problems from time to time -- but when I fired up my PS3 for the first time in a week to check the Store and play online and found myself kicked off the PSN repeatedly I was miffed. For VoodooExtreme it's downright ugly: PSN Goes Down like a $10 Whore. Yikes.

The PS Blog today reiterated that yes, they are still having service problems and no, they don't yet know when it'll be back to normal. They even went so far as to say it may be a full day or two.

Am I totally wrong in thinking their integration with Steam for the launch of Portal 2 might in some way have caused this little snafu? Microsoft may be sitting off in their tall green tower smiling smugly at Sony being so eager to connect to those heathen, unwashed PC Steam gamers... who are totally cool if they want to pre-purchase Fable III on Steam, you know.

From Aeropause.