Victime des pirates informatiques depuis avril dernier, le PlayStation Network va enfin revenir à la normale. Toutes les fonctionnalités du système en ligne seront en effet rétablies d'ici la fin de la semaine, a annoncé le géant de l'électronique dans un communiqué. La restauration concernera tous les pays du monde couverts par Sony, hormis le Japon, Hong Kong et la Corée du Sud. Les joueurs de ces pays asiatiques devront encore faire preuve de patience avant de bénéficier de tous les services de Sony.

Après un retour progressif de ses services en ligne, depuis la mi-mai, Sony va finalement réactiver les fonctionnalités complètes du PlayStation Store, le commerce in-game, l'utilisation des codes et des bons d’achat, les fonctionnalités du service Music Unlimited proposées par Qriocity pour la PS3, PSP, VAIO et les autres PC, ainsi que celles de Media Go, indique la société.

Pour rappel, Sony a été l'objet à la mi-avril de l'une des pires séries d'attaques jamais enregistrées sur la toile, avec le vol d'informations concernant quelque 100 millions d'utilisateurs du PSN, de Qriocity et de sa plate-forme de jeux en ligne pour ordinateur, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE).

(L'essentiel Online/man)

Where most slider phones have a keyboard, Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play sports Playstation controls. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com.

And while it’s a bit on the chubby side, we think that, for Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play, big is beautiful.

You could almost call the Xperia Play the shorter, fatter cousin to the svelte Xperia Arc, which Sony Ericsson once described as the “world’s thinnest smartphone.” At .62 inches, the Play looks positively bulky compared to its Xperia-line relatives — a veritable Jan Brady to the Arc’s Marcia.

But Sony Ericsson had to make some trade-offs in size in order for the slide-out frame to hide the PlayStation controller underneath. If you’re a gamer, it’s worth it. We felt right at home with the familiar PlayStation controller configuration — D-pad on the left, with the square, circle, triangle and X buttons on the right.

And unlike other, flimsier slider phones, the plastic hardware isn’t chintzy. The Play still feels sturdy in hand, even in its open position, and most likely won’t break under the pressure of an excited gamer’s grip.

Instead of the centered joysticks found on a PS3 controller, two pressure-sensitive touchpads take their place. So rather than hog up precious screen real estate steering with your fingers on games that require touch-sensitive direction, you can use the two physical touchpads. It’s a nifty concept, and fairly well-executed. The games I played that utilize the pads were decent enough in reaction time, though I found the sensitivity a bit wanting.

The phone comes bundled with seven games, though only one was exclusive to the Play: Crash Bandicoot. It’s a PS One classic, and I was psyched to see it on the roster. But if I’m buying the long-awaited PlayStation phone, I want it to be running PlayStation games. Plural.

When I asked if Sony Ericsson would continue publishing PlayStation classics to the Xperia Play, the answer was cagey, though promising: “It’s the first step we’re taking down this path.” I’ve got my fingers crossed for a Twisted Metal port by the end of the year.

I actually enjoyed the experience of gaming on the Play. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I was playing a game slapped onto a phone interface. It feels like a standalone portable gaming device. That’s no easy feat to accomplish.

Polygons rendered beautifully on the Play’s 4-inch capacitive touch screen, which was plenty big enough to view the games we played. I did wonder if I’d be wanting more screen surface area while playing a first-person shooter like Call of Duty (or if we really wanted to get old school, Doom) — but since those games aren’t available for the Xperia Play, it’s a moot point for now.

You might think the Play is underpowered, given that its processor is a single-core, 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, not the dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor found in many recent smartphone and tablet offerings. But that’s not the case: the Play ran games and rendered menu screens like a charm. We didn’t experience any noticeable lag while gaming, nor while running Google’s proprietary smartphone apps like Gmail or Calendar.

Oh, and did we mention that the Xperia Play is also an Android phone? Because it is, and not a shabby one at that. Over the five days we spent with the phone, Verizon’s network coverage was ample. From Seattle to San Francisco, we didn’t experience any dropped calls or have much of a problem finding a signal. One big bummer, however: The phone uses Verizon’s 3G network, not the newer, faster 4G network.

Like many other smartphones, it’s got two cameras — VGA on the front as well as a 5-megapixel back-facing brother — but they’re not the greatest. The few shots I took looked washed out, a bit grainier than I would have liked. But as far as camera phones go, they’ll get the job done.

But let’s be honest. Cameras aren’t the reason you’re buying this phone. It’s a gamer’s toy, and bells and whistles like front-facing cameras should be judged with that in mind.

Our verdict after a week with the Play?

Game on.

What would happen if your future arrived too early? If you got the keys to your first car when you were eight? Landed your first big management job at 15?

I’ve been asking those questions while playing with the Cr-48 laptop, the first implementation of Google’s cloud-based Chrome operating system. After a few months with it, I feel like it’s important, but I also think it’s from a future we’re simply not ready for.

The Cr-48 has minimal local storage, no discernible file system, no print drivers, and no client applications to install. That’s because Google has tossed the concept of local content, moved everything to the cloud, and replaced the desktop with a browser. Want to know what it’s like? Open a browser and ignore everything else on your machine. The world is yours—as long as it’s available on the Web.

Using the Cr-48 for the first time is like diving into cold water; after you get over the shock, it’s quite bracing. The advantages of going all-in, cloudwise, are obvious. Bootup takes seconds; upgrades occur automatically, including for applications, which all run on the web; and if you lose your device, you don’t lose all your data.

OK, that last part is more of a goal than a reality, as the 150,000 Gmail users who saw their accounts temporarily wiped clean in February found out the hard way. But another specter looms over the whole enterprise: Can we count on connectivity? Promises to bring broadband to every corner of the nation have so far proven empty. And a Chrome OS device not connected to the Internet is … a keyboard. Google’s solution is built-in cellular 3G. Fees for this pilot project are zero for the first 100 megabytes of data each month, $20 per gigabyte per month thereafter. That’s fine for simple document creation but very costly if you’re streaming video.

These shortcomings highlight the lack of pervasive, reasonably priced, and truly high-speed broadband in the United States. And now that telcos and cable companies are starting to charge by the amount of data used, people will be less likely to embrace innovations that rely on high-speed connections. Google’s system assumes an infrastructure that we don’t have.

In addition, the legal and regulatory framework for cloud computing is still evolving, as we are reminded by the government subpoenas for digital information on people tied to Wikileaks. If we’re going to make the leap to the cloud, we’ll need renewed assurances that personal data on the servers of Google or other companies will enjoy the same protections as the information stored on our personal hard drives and in our desk drawers.

More prosaically, in the short term, adopting the Google model means leaving behind every software program that runs native on the computer. Google can rattle off legitimate alternatives, many of them its own products, and desktop stalwarts like Microsoft Office, Skype, and, it’s rumored, iTunes, are taking to the cloud as well. Unfortunately for Google, there are still plenty of client apps that won’t soon be duplicated—and efforts like Apple’s Mac App Store are introducing even more. In addition, many businesses continue to rely on specialized desktop-based software.

In Google’s defense, part of Chrome’s raison d’être is to hasten the development of cloud apps and sweep the very concepts of hard drives and client software into the dustbin of computer history. The company wants us to leave behind our fixation on physically possessing our data and using applications that run directly on the computer. We can be lighter and more nimble.

I agree with Google that the current paradigm will one day be considered irrational and even quaint. But that day isn’t here.

Email steven_levy@wired.com.