Holy Shit The 3DS Is Real!

The Nintendo 3DS has been rumored for a couple of months, but at E3 2010 it has become really real. It has the rumored 3D screen that doesn’t require glasses, what looks like a joystick and graphics that is supposedly around Wii quality.
The 3DS has a similar form factor to the DS, but with a much larger top screen (3.5inch). It features a touch pad down the bottom, and now features a built-in gyroscope and motion sensor for another form of game control.
It will also be able to record and take 3D photos with the dual cameras on the outside of the case, plus as an added bonus it will be able to play back 3D movies (whether there will be a media store or not is still up in the air).
No pricing or release date has been set, but seeing as it is now out in the open, it can’t be that far away.

Via [Gizmodo]

To My Dear PSP

I have had hundreds of gadgets in my life. Majority of them end up on ebay after a very short relationship. There is one gadget, that even though I barely use it, I can’t bring myself to let go of. That is my Sony PSP (2000).

We are talking about a device, which upon release broke sales records, and even got shining reviews. To date you could call the device a success after selling over 60 million units worldwide.

Even now after 7 years of being available I look at it in wonder. It is still such a full featured device.

Unfortunately the point of its existence never really came to fruit, and that is the games. It had a few surprises such as Patapon and Loco Roco, but the rest were usually bad ports from older consoles or generally weak. Part of this is due to the nature of the PSP. It was the first truly 3D handheld back in the days when Window Mobile was still considered the elite of the smartphones. It was great at pushing polygons, but terrible at intelligence. Games didn’t have the challenge or the scale of its bigger brother the PS2 (or PS3).

What happened to most PSP’s is they got custom firmwared so people could keep the media functions and also play old school ROM’s (SNES etc..). This of course didn’t work on the business model ‘lose money on the device and make it back on games’ because no one was buying games. Because no one was buying the games, the bigger companies pulled back their development, meaning that most of the big name PSP games are Sony developed. This caused 1 big title to come out every couple of months, instead of the 3+ titles the Nintendo DS got.

To make matters worse, the handheld media market started to slip away with the release of the Apple Touch and the App Store. People got their dumb 3D games, but they were (and still are) cheap and had plenty of competition to choose from.

What did Sony do to stem this thread? They did 2 major things. They setup downloadable mini games (called Mini’s) and released the PSPgo. Unfortunately for Sony, they priced both of them too high, with some of the Mini’s being available on Apples App Store for a fraction of the price of buying it on the Playstation Network.

For the PSPgo to succeed Sony had to do the market research into who would be interested in it. The people would be the current owners of PSP’s who would be interested in having a smaller feature rich device and people who liked the Apple Touch but wanted more mature and higher quality games.

Unfortunately they got the big titles to the online market too slowly after initial release and then priced them at the same price as their retail counter parts. They also didn’t offer a music solution and movie solution even though Sony is one of the biggest media companies in the world. To make matters worse, they alienated their current PSP customers by not offering them a way of getting their currently owned games onto their new PSPgo.

Before I go on, I want to call Sony out on another recent mistake. They are blaming their failure on piracy. Because their device was so easy to pirate people didn’t buy games. Because it was so easy to pirate people didn’t need to buy the PSPgo because they already had all the games they wanted on a memory stick. If this was true the Nintendo DS should have failed as well. It was far easier to pirate and the games were much smaller, meaning you didn’t need big expensive Sony Memory Sticks to do it. Sony, the PSP failed because Apples Touch and the Nintendo DS were both better solutions.

I write this and stare lovingly at my PSP. It still feels so good to hold, and though your index fingers get cramps from trying to hit the left and right triggers, the device is a pleasure to use.

Now I have brought my old PSP out of retirement for my 2 year old daughter to use as a movie player when we travel. Its still one of the best options for video and audio playback on the cheap, plus I already have a nice big 8gb MS Pro Duo.

There were a couple of things Sony could have done early on to really stop the rapid market share loss. First thing was to open the device up. There is still a large homebrew community, who has to hack their PSP to do what they want with it to. You could get rid of the custom firmware excuse and open up a new market for people who like to tinker. If you add the ability for people to give or sell their developments then you would also have a worthy App Store competitor.

The second thing is stick to the standards. Only the PSP used UMD. You had minidisc and a ton of other formats that you could have used. Otherwise, open the UMD standard up so that a larger range of devices had the capacity making you not feel so bad for wasting your money on UMD’s.

The last thing is the price. It is a new market now. You can make money on a device and the games; you just have to balance it correctly. The PSP didn’t need to come down to $149 to sell more. You had to get those $50 games down to $20 and the $5 games down to App Store $1.

I am confident if those 3 things had been done from the start I wouldn’t be writing this, but instead be playing sweet new release games on my PSP. I hope that Sony learns from their past mistakes and makes the PSP2 an extraordinary device.

Everyone Wants To Be An E-Reader

Nintendo is bringing E-Books to the lowest resolution 4.2 inch screen in the world. The device is the DSi XL with a resolution of 256 x 192. In other words, prepare for the worst migraines you could ever imagine.
The books in mention are classics (public domain I believe, so the authors are long dead) and will be released on the 14 June. I wouldn’t get to excited, because while Nintendo has a large followers of fanboys, they won’t be to happy when their eyes melt (in other words, don’t expect an Amazon partnership).

Via [Engadget]

Is The PSP Phone A Good Idea?

People have a misconception about the current state of technology. There has been a move of the last 50 years of trying to put as many things into one device as possible. An example could be the clock radio (which works well) or the Gas Powered Toolbox (they took stupid and added danger to it). I think the hype surrounding the PSP Phone is a good example of how  merging devices could quite possibly work if made correctly, but chances are will fail horribly.
How many people reading this own a mobile phone with a camera? Do you also own a digital camera? Chances are you said yes to both, and with good reason. 1. Why would you take pictures with your phone when you know they will turn out crap (fixed lens, with tiny pinhole to let light in)? 2. Your phone has a rated 5 hours of talk time. Now remove the battery life required to use you camera frequently and what do you have? You have a phone with shitty pictures accompanied by shitty battery life.
What has all this got to do with the marvellous PSP Phone? The PSP gets like 3-5 hours depending what  you are doing on it (videos or games). Add the phone functions to the mix and it will cut it down considerately. You sit on the train, play your PSP Phone, then make a call to work saying you are running late, then message that girl from the club who said if you come 10 feet from her she will call the cops, and what you are left with is not much battery life. That doesn’t even include the pirated Lost episodes (or Scrubs if you have taste), and your music library (which is completely legitimate).
It seems to be about the device that do everything. Your mobile can already play games, and surf the net, watch videos and play music. When you actually watch your battery disappearing you will understand what I mean.
There are a lot of points I can use to further display a distaste for the PSP Phone, but I would miss the positive possibilities of the system. The PSP Phone could say, feature some incredible battery, OLED screen and a Cell processor that together will bring you a new generation of mobile goodness. The chances of that happening are about as high as the chances of Hillary Clinton becoming the next President (won’t I look silly if she wins).
Sony are talking about doing the iPhone thing with the touch screen that can change depending on function. Has anyone tired running emulated games on an iPhone with touch screen controls? Utter crap is all that can be said for it. How do you emulate a joystick on a touch screen, without giving you big freaking blisters?!.
The PSP can’t sacrifice anything more if it wants to compete against Nintendo. If it loses screen size, it will fail. If the controls get any more acquit it will fail. If the games take longer, run slower or look worse, guess what will happen? It will fail. Keep them separate, and sit with me while we watch N-Gage fail once again.

Gods WiiMote

If the almighty had played the Wii (as Nintendo would surely like him to do), then his (or hers) Wiimote would be the new Darwin remote. The Motus controller is a Wiimote gone wild, with gyroscopes and accelerometers too make this guy more accurate then the Wii’s infra-red tracker.
At first glance it doesn’t look like much, but will give you the ability to do more, and will also be compatible with the PS3 and your desktop computer. You do pay a premium for the advances, with an estimated street value of $US79 to $US99. Remember, there is no guarantee that it will run with your Wii games.

For more info, click over to DVICE.

Exploit Your Wii, Chipless

Been waiting off on buying a Wii until hackers could exploit it enough to not use a modchip? Your time has now arrived, with some genius’s working out how to crash Zelda and then hack into the system to run exploit code. What’s next? Maybe Linux Wii Edition?

For more info, click over to Engadget.

Amazon Shift Wii’s Really Fast

For the poor people out there who can’t get a Wii, I would like to show you these numbers. Amazon, one of the biggest online retailers in the world, on December the 10th was selling 62.5 items per second. Now compare that to the fact that when Amazon had the Wii in stock it was being shifted at 17 items per second. Lastly, ask yourself why Nintendo haven’t really dropped the price on the Wii yet?

For more info, click over to the Gamasutra Website. Thank you Kotaku for the picture.

Nintendo Sell A DS Every 5 Seconds

I wish I had a product which sold every 5 seconds. I might not but Nintendo do with there DS portable gaming console. This number is calculated on the 6 million DS’s sold last year in the US alone. That is around 16,500 a day or around 700 an hour or 11 a minute and finally 0.2 every second. Multiply that by 5 and you get a DS sold every 5 seconds. If that is for the US only image the number if you include the rest of the world!

For more info, click over to the Gizmodo Blog.

Wii Demand So Large This Christmas, They Are Pulling Ads

Imagine that, a company that actually wants to sell less products. Nintendo have decided to cancel some ads in the U.K, instead filling the spots with DS ads (like that needs help to sell). It has come up after the massive demand for the Wii this Christmas and the inability to meet it in production. Nintendo said they want to “take a responsible stance this Christmas and not fuel demand.” There may be a Wii left on the shelf this Christmas after all (sorry I was being sarcastic).

Check out Engadget for the full article.

Update: WiiWare Gives More Info For The Masses

Who wants to download brand new full version games, without having to use a PC or wait for Phantom Entertainment to make a comeback? That is where WiiWare comes in, which is basically full game downloads to your Nintendo Wii. Earlier I talked about the games that were coming to it and a bit of info on the system, but now Nintendo has released a few other snip bits that should quench your fanboy thirst.
Each game will have a size limit of 40MB, which will fill its 512 MB of storage pretty damn fast (unless they let you use either a USB HDD or an SD card). Apparently, the devs will release a maximum of 1 game a month, with a max budget of $US100,000. Seems to be a lot like Xbox Arcade and less like a cool new full featured game download service. Guess we will have to wait for the rain of game reviews before we can make any judgement.

For more info, dance over to the Kotaku Blog.