January

24th of January 2007
Firmware 1.50 is released, it fixes some graphical glitches, present in PS1/PS2 games

24th of January 2007
Sony and Namco Bandai set up a games company, called Cellius, the company will utilise the Cell Broadband Engine in the PS3 to create games for the console and Mobile Phones,Ken Kutaragi is the CEO, if you want to read more about this story, check here.

February

2nd of February 2007
Firmware 1.51 released, expands support for PS2 games.

4th February 2007

A group known a ferrox, release a video showing proof that they had an ISO loader for then PS3, they were in direct competition with Paradox, who had yet to release theirs, here are a couple of videos:

the guys behind the exploit, ended up informing Sony and it was patched.

27th February 2007
Someone called PSPHaCkErAOD says he will release a PS3 ISO loader, he calls it ps3load3 v0.5 beta.

28th of February 2007
Firmware 1.54 released, added USB web cam support and added individual icons from the photo menu.

March

1st of March 2007
Seen the very first method of running PS2 backups on the PS3, this was quite a dirty method and involved the console being half taken apart, overkill for a brand new console, more about that can be read here:
Post #3

4th of March 2007
PS3HaX is created.

Between the time the PS3 was released in Japan and EU, two groups had a working ISO loader for the PS3, or rather they claimed to.
Paradox the famous warez/demo group had been hard on working on the very first PS3 hack, if you consider an ISO loader a hack or not is your opinion, but Paradox had the PS3 doing what it shouldn’t be doing, their ISO loader had been confirmed by the well known Team Xecuter, they guys responsible for mod chips on the Xbox 1 and many more.
Team Xecuter uncovered what they called “Hyperdrive”, this would be released with the ISO Loader and enable you to connect and 3.5″ Sata/IDE HDD to the PS3, in order for you to store the ISO’s, the ISO loader disappeared and was never heard of again, there was quite a lot of speculation about this, Paradox were supported by a site called ps3news.com, the owner of this site had been renown for its epic fail during the PSP years, for stealing, when he stole PSP CFW, edited and caused many PSP to be bricked(more on them later).

22nd of March 2007
Firmware 1.60 released, this is quite a big update and adds many updates, such as support for, Install Other OS, support for bluetooth keyboards and mice, support for recordable Blu Ray disc’s, it
added the folding@home client(f@h), background downloading and an on-screen qwerty keyboard.

23rd March 2007
The PS3 is released in Europe, it is backwards compatible, but is missing the Emotion Engine

23rd March 2007
Well known and respected PSP/PS3 scene dev Mathieulh give his opinion on the Paradox ISO Loader, here is a quote from his post on Max Console:

Answer from Mathieulh to paradox

I have yet to see their exploit in action, so far all they came up with were nice sentences in nfo but no proofs. If the exploit got patched in 1.54, then why don’t they release anything ? It smells more and more like bullshit to me.

The way I see it is that if pdx do not release anything within a week, then I will (and probably so will the rest of the ps3 scene) think that this is just a scam in order to promote their group. Everyone knew for more than a week now that EU ps3 came with 1.50, so it could have been long since pdx could have released it, yet I thought “maybe they plan a release for the EU release date” but yet we still see nothing and all we have are useless clues. Either they have something, either they don’t, and if they don’t plan on releasing anything, then they should just not talk about it.

P.S. for your intel, both Alex and I now own a ps3, as well as a lot of more hackers, we are all waiting pdx to do the first move and we wont do anything until they show us some proofs.
PDX mention Dark_Alex on their nfo, but yet they did not contact him, thus we do not know if pdx’s exploit is real or not, we have waited weeks for it and saw nothing, we have plenty of projects ourselves, and unless a group finds an initial exploit on ps3 it is unlikely that we start working on it.
If pdx wants to contact us and show us proof of their exploit working, we would be very glad to see it in action, otherwise I think they should even forget about mentioning Alex in their nfo. We do not have yet anything to do with pdx and we do not want to be associated with a group’s action which does not even think of contacting us.

You can view it here, along with the responses to the post.
If the post gets lost, you can view it as an image here:
http://ps3historyimages.ps3history.com/albums/userpics/10001/Answer_from_Mathieulh_to_paradox_-_Snippet_from_maxconsole_co2C.PNG

April

11th of April 2007
Sony announced the discontinuation of the 20GB SKU, followed by an announcement on the on the 9th of July 2007 that an 80GB SKU would be released, this was identical to the EU 60GB SKU but was only available in US, it was released on the 6th of August 2007, which saw the 60GB SKU drop in price.

22nd of April 2007
Seen the release of a refined version of the PS2 backup method, this way was more practical, you can read about it here

19th Of July 2007
Kazuo Hirai gives a new interview to Kikizo, you can find it here:
http://archive.videogamesdaily.com/features/kazhirai_iv_jul07_p1.asp
Audio of following video belongs to above link.

Between July 2007 and October 2007
Seen the end of production of the 60GB PS3, once stocks died, this would leave the 80GB SKU as the main SKU in US, with EU PS3 fans being told that the 80GB SKU wouldn’t be released in the EU, where would that leave them.

September

September 2007
hermes release a method of playing Emulators, without the need of Linux on the PS3, this was accomplished by using PSXLoader and SwapMagic, here is a video of it in action:

October

5th of October 2007
SCEE announced a 40GB SKU for Pal territories, it was released on October the 10th 2007, with a Ceramic White version released only in Japan later that year, this console had no software emulation for PS2 games, thus was the emergence of a non backwards compatible PS3, this would eventually replace the 60GB SKU, when stocks ran dry, meaning, EU/Pal territories, would no longer have a BC PS3.

Between October 23rd and 26th
The successor to the PS2′s Eye Toy was released, it would be called Playstation Eye(PS Eye), here are some specs:

Video and Audio
640×480 pixels @ 60 Hz
320×240 pixels @ 120 Hz
16-bit audio @ 48 kHz

Field of View
56 degrees FOV
76 degrees FOV
Depth Sensor

Features
Full body detection (as shown by King fu Live)
Low light sensor
Compatible with a real life controller (MOVE)

Applications
Facial Recognition and CV Head Tracking (Vision Library)
Voice Control in 20 languages via PSVR (PlayStation Voice Recognition)
Video/Audio recording and editing software, with a variety of functions

Meanwhile in the homebrew/circumventing scene around October 2007 people from a well known site called ps2dev.org had discovered a way to get full access to the RSX, which would have meant full 3D via Linux, whilst this was an awesome endeavour by the people involved, it was short lived, on December 18th 2007, Sony released firmware update 2.10, which killed this exploit.
On the PS3 front 2007, ended rather dull, with nothing happening apart from a few bundles being released.