The above screens surfaced recently at psp3d.com. Yes fellow gamers, the day that psp owners cry foul over whether to upgrade or not may be near at hand.
Although hardcore homebrewers will stay at their current firmware, some may be interested in what 3.0 may offer, which, after taking a look at these screens, seems to be quite alot.
So far only the GPS and Email service have been confirmed, so we'll have to wait for an official announcement to see what else Sony has up their sleeve.
In regards to the authenticity of the screens, the admin of psp3D had this to say:
"As they say, it's nice to have people on the 'inside'. One of our exclusive sources has provided us with some great snapshots of an early build of firmware 3.0 he got his hands on. At this point, we are unsure as to what all the menu items actually do, as the source would not provide any additional informatioin regarding that. As far as security, the GTA hack has been "somewhat patched" in the new firmware. Being as the savegame hack was both a software hack and a hardware hack, Sony must have developed a new way of loading SYSCALLs, in order for currently distributed copies of GTA: LCS to work on them, as GTA itself was never pulled from the market for patching. This definitely rises some speculation here, and we can only hope that 3.0 is coming sooner, rather than later. But Sony will definitely have to pack a punch in the new firmware, with tons of new features and capabilities, otherwise the whole homebrewing community will not update, and it will be a flop.
Update: After posting these pictures, as was originally thought before we posted them, there has been a lot of conspiracy theories/flaming. Although I (the Admin) personally still believe that these are legit snapshots, there have been quite a few points that have been mentioned on other sites regarding them. One of the important things is the found is the font of the date/time. Lets make something straight, IF this image were truly photoshopped, then it would have taken a lot of skill to do, and any professional artist would not take the risk of using a different font for date/time. The current 1.XX/2.XX font could have been easily replicated. Which brings us to another point, when talking with the source of the images before we released this to public, he made it clear to us that this is only one of many, many builds of firmware built daily at Sony. Builds are not perfect, there are glitches, small changes, lots of things purely for testing purposes. This is why I still believe these are legit, and that the source is a man I personally know and met at CES 2005; I talk to him all the time, and highly doubt he would do such a prank of this scale. I will get in touch as soon as possible, and get some explanations from him. I will also ask for a video, but an EBOOT will not be leaked. Sony uses lots of protection for internal build distributions, by enabling individual MAC address checks, and even incorporating staff names' into the EBOOT code, to easily track down leakers and press charges. We'll keep you updated as we get more information."
More as this develops.
Source