So I grabbed the v1.60 update yesterday for my PS3. It took a good bit to download at 5pm EST. I guess the servers were getting hammered. After installing (and fearing it would corrupt my hard drive like previous updates were doing to tons of users), I got to check out some of the features.

First off, kudos to Sony for Folding@Home. It’s a great program from the minds at Stanford University, and having PS3 users participate is a great way to have some good come from your console. One of the first things I did was download the Folding client (it’s not included by default in the v1.60 firmware update). The 50MB download took me a few minutes. Once I accepted the license agreement, I was off and folding. By default, everyone’s name is “PS3″ and not on a team. You can change this if you’re already a part of Folding, or just leave it as is. I checked the CPU/OS stats, and there were roughly 4000 PS3’s on the folding network at the time. I think this is a great accomplishment.

Background downloading works well. I wish it automatically went into the background queue, but instead, you have to click “Perform in Background” for every download you want to add to the queue. An extra step, but it still works. I played a couple games while downloading with no problems.

The other big feature, as I see it, was the addition of the disk auto-start option. I love being able to turn off that option, so when I put in a disk, it won’t automatically start. I expected this from the start with the PS3, since it’s in the PSP, but it didn’t take that long for them to add it.

Overall, the firmware update is better than I first thought. I thought it would be a cheap upgrade. Granted, I still expected more given the hype Sony made about it. But it’s still a nice update to the system. Now, if they can only push out some good games…