PlayStation Store is now accessible from a browser

Sony has finally gotten around to letting you buy stuff from the PlayStation Store without having to switch on your PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Vita. The web-based version of the PlayStation Store is now live and lets you buy games and other goodies for your PlayStation devices. Click here to visit the PlayStation Store.

Sony is by no means the first to make its store available online, though. Microsoft previously made the Xbox Marketplace available online through Xbox.com.

Buying from the PlayStation Store is relatively simple. After choosing a product and submitting the required information, the website simply adds the product to the download queue of the device you bought it for the next time you turn it on.

Sony is revamping the Trophy collection

Back in October, Sony released a major update for the PlayStation 3 and shut down some older services. The biggest changes were made to how and where your trophies are displayed.

Previously, trophies were displayed in the Game section of the XMB (cross media bar). With the update, the trophies are instead found in the PlayStation Network section of the XMB, and you can see more information on a game’s trophies without having to go into the trophy information section. Another big change is that the PlayStation 3’s trophy section also displays trophies earned in PlayStation Vita games. You are also be able to see your trophy level and progress towards the next level while viewing your trophy collection.

Sony also shut down some of the services available on the PlayStation 3 in November. The first to go down was Life with PlayStation. This would also conclude Sony’s participation in the Folding@home project by Stanford University—a distributed computing project that was aimed that understanding protein folding, misfolding, and studying the causes of a variety of diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Vijay Pande, Folding@home Research Lead at Stanford University, had this to say about the contributions of the players in the project: “The PS3 system was a game changer for Folding@home, as it opened the door for new methods and new processors, eventually also leading to the use of GPUs. We have had numerous successes in recent years. Specifically, in a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, we report on tests of predictions from earlier Folding@home simulations, and how these predictions have led to a new strategy to fight Alzheimer’s disease. The next steps, now underway at Stanford, are to take this lead compound and help push it towards a viable drug. It’s too early to report on our preliminary results there, but I’m very excited that the directions set out in this paper do appear to be bearing fruit in terms of a viable drug (not just a drug candidate).”