Geekfishing Blog

GamingGroove 2.0 reviews the PSP. First, thanks to Jon Lazarus for getting me a PSP. What a cool device. Costs $250 and I've never been much of a console gamer. Interesting to see what folks think about it. The game console guys just love the think, but I had great hopes for it as a general purpose machine for videos and music.

PROS

Here's the net is that it is agreat gaming system...

Graphics and Speed. It is an incredibly cool gaming device. With dual 300MHz MIPS processors and an incredibly fast graphics processor, it is the gaming system to beat. Heck, it is as fast as most PCs of just a few years ago.

The screen, the screen, the screen. And did I mention how incredibly good the screen and the audio is. And, they use white headphones on a black device (thank you Steve Jobs for the inspiration I'm sure). The thing is huge and this makes the device really big.

Video quality. It does come with Spiderman 2 and I've changed my opinion on a screen like this it is big enough that I would watch movies all day. The Sony Watchman lives!

The Lucite buttons. Finally, the lucite buttons at the top are very cool as a feature and it is shiny black (so shiny you get fingerprints everywhere), but it looks pretty cool. Although not iPod minimalist, more on that below.

CONS.

But, as usual Sony has given the thing a bunch of proprietary technology that leave me kind of sad. It has great potential IMHO for being more than, but unfortunatey in (now) typical Sony style, its got a ton of proprietary out-of-the-mainstream features. It doesn't have the fit and finish of an Apple iPod when you open it, but it is pretty close in coolness. And it finally does play back MP3s and not just the locked proprietary ATRAC format.

Here are the depressing things that mainly revolve around how proprietary and how many buttons there are:

MemoryStick. I don't get it. It comes with a 32MB MemoryStick. How sad that they don't just use SD cards or something that is available everywhere. 99% of all machine (e.g., everyone but Sony) doesn't have a MemoryStick reader and it means you are investing in a proprietary format. The only way to read it off the bad is that you have to find a USB cable (hope you have a Blackberry) to get it to connect to a PC. Put another way, it isn't more convenient than a 1GB Apple Shuffle.

UMD. They use a proprietary disk format based on MiniDisc (another thing Sony just won't give up on). It does store 1.8GB in dual layer, but so would a mini dual-layer DVD. Most sad is that means you can't put PC content on it. Now the console market is all about proprietary so that doesn't hurt vs. a Nintendo DS, but it does mean (drool, Sony execs), you get to rebuy your entire video collection if you want to watch movies with it.

Wifi. Really this is just a proprietary connection. It actually talks about adhoc and infrastructure mode (yikes!), but it only finds other PSPs and uses infrastructure mode just to find the Sony update site. What a sad thing that it has Wifi, but no software to really use it that I can find.

The Charger. Why doesn't everyone just use USB charging? It is so simple and the thing has a brick the size of the device. How nice to be able to just find a USB port just about anywhere. Blackberry got this right first and then Apple.

The Buttons. There are just way too many buttons on the thing and they are truly micro-sized. There are buttons for volume up and down, select, etc. I counted no less than 20 buttons on the darn thing. Now for gaming, you have to have at least 10 (two hat things, plus two selects at the top and then there is a joystick), but the rest of them, I have to wonder.

The User Interface. They have this problem in that half the user interface are random buttons that are tiny and the rest are on a kind of funky 2-D interface that is really just two levels of menus. The overall user interface has an interesting two D style of icons that just remind me how simple command tree interfaces like 1-2-3, Blackberry, iPod and MS Works really do work better in the long run for things like this.

Hard Drive. If Apple can charge $500 for its iPod Photo, you wonder a little bit how cool this guy would have been with a 20GB hard disk.

CONCLUSION

This thing I'm sure is going to take the gamine console world by storm, but it had so much potential as a more general purpose iPod replacement (this really what I would expect the iPod Video to look like). It is too bad that there are all those proprietary limitations. Still, it leave the field IMHO wide open for Apple if they want it to create the $1,000 iPod Video that does everything here, but does it right which would include all the hardware listed above, but bag the proprietary things and make it live in a PC world, so the dream machine is:

Hard Disk. Slam a hard disk into the thing for long term storage

USB and Wifi. Make this work with PCs so that you can see the device as one big drive. Allow synchronization with an iTunes equivalent and iMovies equivalent.

Mini-DVD. Bag the UMD and use mini-DVD if you have to have optical storage. Personally, with a 40GB hard drive, I'm not sure why you can't just use conventional PC to dock and get the stuff. I'm sure piracy is the big concern here and the game console guys have this model where they use proprietary formats and get a revenue share on games and then buy down the game machine price, so that's why Sony can't do it, but Apple.

Movies. Support xvid and divx movies that are generic rather than the proprietary format. This is analogous to playing MP3 and then a protected version. Imagine watching Alias on this thing and having a bunch stored there.