My son wants one (duh) - its his birthday tomorrow. But he actually wants a 30 gb iPod photo more..... The PSP does look like a nice device for playing games on the road but various reviews have panned its software for music and playback of movies also isn't so great. Music is loaded through a MemoryStick Duo and you only get 32 Mb in the box. Not sure how well it works with a Mac (Sony will release a Mac connection kit later although there are some software apps being developed by third parties to help interface the PSP with a Mac). The movies have to be in a new format which is like a kind of mini-DVD and I don't think the games will play on the PS2. The screen is reported to be really clear (and wide format) but battery life is lacking somewhat. It has built-in 802.11b too for wireless gaming.
I think Sony will sell a pile of these - and it may develop into more than a games machine over time. However, for the present, it really is just a portable gaming player - a very good one.
There is no denying that it's a nice machine but like anything else there will be problems with the 1st generation of units and those souls that do buy the 1st units will bear the brunt of the high prices. The same happened to my wife when the Nintedo Gamecube came out she bought one for my Christmas present soon after it was released then about a month before Christmas they shot down $100.00 and she was kicking herself the same will happen with the PSP.
My recomendation is if you have a Gameboy SP there is plenty of life left in it and the games that are on the way look good enough to at least keep me busy for another year then I should be ready for the PSP but by then the PS3 should be out ARRGGGGGH it will never end.....I'm ok for now
On CNET, out of 714 users, the average user rating was 7.3 out of 10. Not too great. I'm looking at it out of interest today, no thoughts of buying that sort of thing, and I gather the following:
- touts DVD-quality video playback, but you have to buy these little discs that don't play on anything else and they cost as much as DVDs
- 5-6 hours of gaming battery life - not too shabby
- Playstation 2 - quality games, i.e. great graphics. But there's no way to get your existing PS2 games on there
- really great game controls, particularly the joystick
- $400 CDN
My take - if you love mobile gaming, this is sahweet. All the hype about it doing more than just gaming turns out to be fluff in this first revision, but lets see what next years version does. It's a start. It's certainly not as amazing a release as the iPod or the Walkman.
Lets see, what could be in next year's revision? Maybe a hard drive. A CELL processor perhaps. Maybe a software program that can copy a DVD or PS2 game onto that hard drive in copy-protected form. Maybe a system to buy tunes and movies or TV over WiFi. Full PDA functions. A VoIP phone. Now that would definitely be worth $400.
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