Accord­ing to Eric Lem­pel, direc­tor of PlaySta­tion Net­work Oper­a­tions, the new PS3 firmware update will be made avail­able very soon. Ver­sion 2.30 will include the revamped PLAYSTATION Store which – I have to say – looks really nice. There a video avail­able fea­tur­ing Grace Chen, Senior Man­ager of the PLAYSTATION Store, who will walk the viewer through the new store. The most impor­tant news here is that the new store won’t be web-based any­more. This will make it more fluid and eas­ier to nav­i­gate, accord­ing to Chen. Well, have a look for yourself.

If you don’t want to watch a video or if you just don’t have time right now, here are a few screen­shots depict­ing the inter­face of the new PLAYSTATION Store.

And here’s the video walk through:

The sec­ond big news is that he sys­tem soft­ware update will also add DTS-HD Mas­ter Audio and DTS-HD High Res­o­lu­tion out­put for Blu-ray videos. I don’t own a costly audio setup so that doesn’t affect me in the least, but I’m sure that there are quite a few audio­philes out there who will appre­ci­ate the high qual­ity audio expe­ri­ence on the PS3.

Now only one ques­tion remains: How soon is very soon? Grace Chen more than once men­tions mid-April and she even says that GT: Pro­logue will be avail­able from the PLAYSTATION Store on April 17^th. In Japan the update is specif­i­cally sched­uled for April 15^th, so expect the new firmware some­time between those dates.