se71

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October 12, 2005

PSP

PSP

What a little beauty, almost all good, with just a bit bad, and overall an essential purchase.

So you have a mobile phone and a PDA. Between them you probably already have a built in radio and MP3 player, appointments calendar, contacts and to-do lists, simple games and maybe even movie playback. You can view your digital photos and, browse the web and all sorts of fancy stuff. So why do you need yet another device that you can carry around in your pocket and forget to charge? The answer is simple, this has the best quality small screen you've ever seen!

The PSP with version 2.0 of the operating system allows you to do the following 5 things

1. Play games
2. Watch movies
3. Look at photos
4. Play MP3 file
5. Browse the interweb

With the understandable exception of the MP3 player, uses the little crystal clear screen to great effect

The games are fantastic - I have "Everyone's Golf" and "Burnout Legends" and hours of my life have disappeared inside these worlds. They come on disks similar but smaller than minidiscs, which have something like a 1.7Gb capacity. I'm not going to quote graphics throughput or polygon counts at you, but from a players perspective, it compares in speed and quality to a PS2/XBox. The games are massive and the controls feel good even for long periods. A fantastic feature you don't get on mains powered consoles is the suspend/resume. I was half way through a race, and my battery ran out. I put the PSP back on charge, started it up, and resumed the race from the precise spot.

The movie player is great, I registered on the Sony website and they sent me Spiderman2. It is totally watchable, but I think the £20 price tag for movies will mean not many people go for it. With a decent capacity Memory Stick Duo Pro though, and the right software, you can encode your own media. I haven't really studied the DRM issues for this, as the way I'm doing it is dumping programs and films onto the PSP from ones I've recorded off the TV using my DVD-Recorder. Admittedly, this is a slightly slow method, and I don't use it much yet. What I really need is some way to get last night's episode of 'Lost' or 'CSI' onto memory stick with a few mouse clicks, then I really think I'll feel the real benefit. I'd like to timeshift my TV viewing onto the train, so that I could spend time at home doing other things - some programs aren't appropriate for my children to watch, and as it's impossible to get them to go to bed anymore, I end up missing them now.

The photo viewer is simplicity itself, just stick in the USB cable and drag and drop the jpg files into the correct folder on the Memory Stick. I've subjected several relatives to slideshows of my holiday snaps already.

The MP3 player is OK, but hardly inspiring. I'd like them to do a lot more on this for future Firmware upgrades. For example, why can't I listen to MP3s whilst web browsing? Why is the MP3 artwork not shown full screen. Why can't I have playlists, and why can't folders be more than two levels deep. But, it plays music, which is nice if you'd rather read your book/paper on the train than smash up sportscars in Burnout or watch Spiderman2 for the Nth time.

The Internet browser is impressive and much better looking than you'd think. Connection to my home (and office, and Burger King) wireles network just works. Entering addresses on the software keyboard is painful, so I use my del.icio.us bookmark page as a homepage and that leads me to everywhere I generally like to go - like BBC News, Bloglines, Slashdot. Tabbed browsing is supported, and cookies get stored to reduce logging on pain. It's very nice, I'd love to do instant messaging on it, but this and other applications would be impossible without with an external keyboard/mouse (I think they are in development).

The MP3 player is OK, but hardly inspiring. I'd like them to do a lot more on this for future Firmware upgrades. For example, why can't I listen to MP3s whilst web browsing? Why is the MP£ artwork not shown full screen. Why can't I have playlists, and why can't folders be more than two levels deep. But, it plays music, which is nice if you'd rather read your book/paper on the train than smash up sportscars in Burnout or watch Spiderman2 for the Nth time.

I waited a long time before buying a handheld gaming device, having been tempted by Nintendo and N-Gage, but never quite being convinced I'd actually use them. I know I made the right choice with the PSP, which does so much more, and has upgrade possibilities that mean many uses we haven't even thought of yet will happen. And with it's wireless multiplayer gaming possibilities, I'm even tempted to get another one!

Posted by se71 at October 12, 2005 03:51 PM

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