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The new look PlayStation store launched on Tuesday but sadly has glaring problems apparent within 30 seconds of use. Namely that the images that make up the menus are not stored locally on the consoles HDD within the new firmware. This means every time you go into the store the category icons have to be downloaded from Sony’s servers. Due to incredibly slow download times of these images the result is it appears to the user that no content is available in any of the menu options. 

That is unless you hover over an icon to be told what clicking each blank blue square will do by some text that appears at the top of the screen. Alternatively you can relax with a nice cup of tea while waiting for the images to appear in place of the blank squares, then patiently make your selection. Unfortunately this isn’t the end of the wait as when quiting out of the store and returning the images have not been cached and are again very slowly downloaded. The problem is very similar to that of the Xbox originals section of the Xbox Live marketplace where the screen is made up of blank squares that the images eventually get downloaded into. Considering GT5: Prologue installs close to 6gb onto the consoles hard-drive you would think using a small amount of space for some store images wouldn’t be a problem. Presumably the issues are being caused by the large amount of users all trying to download the menu images at the same time. However with the images apparently not being locally cached once downloaded it remains to be seen if this problem will just be restricted to the first few days of launch as everyone goes into the store to check out the new look or if it will continue on into the coming weeks.

Another issue as reported by lasseman.se is that the US PlayStation store has the ability to preview videos by streaming them instead of carrying out a full download. The European store appears to contain no such option at the present time. The general layout of the US store is also reported to be much more streamlined and easy to navigate compared to the European version. Assuming the image issue does get resolved and the Euro/US differences are removed then the update is actually a vast improvement over the old browser based version just that it hasn’t given a good first impression of itself on it’s first day