Eric Lempel, the director of PlayStation Network Operations, has announced in a blog post that a new firmware update for the PlayStation 3 gaming console will be available in a short while. As I'm typing this, the update is live and the PlayStation 3 will urge you to download it the next time you log in.

Eric Lempel only said that the update is here to improve performance for some PS3 games and made no other comments on the subject. A change log is nowhere to be found around the various Sony and PlayStation sites. Sony tends to do this, even if there's the downside that most users, without any clear knowledge of what the firmware update does, could opt not to download the patch and will surely speculate wildly as to the reasons of why Sony released an update in the first place and what it is supposed to fix.

Most users naturally thought "GTA IV" when they heard that the update improves stability of PS3 games. Even after the 1.01 patch released by Rockstar came to specifically address issues with the PS3 version of GTA IV, there still are players that report lock ups and other problems. Unfortunately, the firmware update does not seem to be aimed at them.

Al de Leon of Sony also posted an entry on the issues of the new firmware and said: "I just want to clarify that this upcoming firmware update isn't related to GTA IV. For those of you who may still have an issue playing the game on your PS3, we have identified a solution that should resolve the issue. You can contact SCEA Consumer Services for support".

So, no joy for the disgruntled GTA IV players that own a PlayStation 3 and can't use it to play the game. Anyhow, we at Softpedia have downloaded the firmware update and applied it and we advise you do the same. We might not know exactly what it does but it comes from Sony and they sure know a lot more about the PlayStation 3 that us gamers do.