PSP Gets 1600 DC Comics

Sony finally seem to really be pushing content to its underrated PlayStation Portable platform. Sony has another trick up its sleeve with the introduction of DC Comics to the already large catalogue of comics available.
For DC fans there are now over 1600 DC flavoured comics available, with more en-route. It is great that Sony is filling the PSP platform with content, but this really should have happened years ago. At least it will set a much greater stage for the PSP2.

Via [Sony Insider]

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.

Fan Made PSP Is So Damn Hot

I’m sure Sony has its reasons for making the slightly awkward PSP. For me personally it hurts to play games for too long (over 2 hours), which turns me off the device. Some genius has made a incredible mock-up of what he would have liked the PSP to be, or perhaps what the next generation PSP should look like.
I love the overall design, and the controls look nice, except for the position of L1 and L2 (look closely, but they are located on the side). The dual joysticks are featured, and the ability to slide the screen down when you want to just watch movies is awesome.
Unfortunately it is just a mock-up at the moment, and the chance of the device ever becoming real is pretty slim. I will keep wishing and hoping and maybe the Sony fairy will grant my wish. Continue reading “Fan Made PSP Is So Damn Hot” »

For Half Price Dev Kits Call Sony

I already talked about the price drop of PS3 dev kits last year. This year it seems the price drop will be repeated, this time for the PSP development kits. Wonder if this will cause an over due influx of PSP games?

For more info, click over to Joystiq.

Skypeing On Your PSP Soon?

I don’t think Skypeing is a word, but I’m going to use it anyway. Some smart chap has noticed a little Skype logo pop up in a PSP ad, which kind of give you the idea that it will be coming to the PSP soon. It will give you the ability to make Skype calls off your PSP, in theory giving your PSP the ability to be a mobile phone (if near a wireless access point). If it’s going to happen it will become official at CES, so you won’t have too wait to much longer.

For more info, click over to the Engadget Blog.

PSP Firmware 3.80 Additions

Who wants to be able to stream internet radio, schedule television recordings and use OPML RSS feeds (whatever that is) from your PSP? Firmware 3.80 brings that to the table as well as other things. Updated features include streaming Internet Radio player, video scene search, RSS support for OPML and pictures, 1Seg tuners can use an EPG to schedule Japanese mobile television recordings (only on the Slim) and PlayStation Spot now available at BB Mobile Point (Japan only). Is it enough for most people, especially anyone outside of Japan to warrant losing your custom firmware? Probably now sorry.

For more info, click over to the Engadget Blog.

PSP Gran Turismo Still Coming?

It seems that it isn’t dead in the grave like everyone expected it to be, but still on the very beautiful drawing board of Kazunori Yamauchi. Though he has said it won’t be out before the PS3 version (GT5), he did says it is coming still. Until then you always have that emulated version don’t you?

For more info, drive over to the Kotaku Blog.

iPhone 1.1.1 Firmware Released

Well it looks like they did it. First Sony did it with the PSP with the constant firmware upgrades to fight Hax0rs (hackers), and now Apple have released firmware which takes away a lot of features and adds very little, in the hope that it will be enough to get people to upgrade. The problem is, is they added a feature that most hackers wouldn’t want anyway. The 1.1.1 firmware adds the wireless Apple music store, which lets people buy music on the go. If you are a hacker you would probably just torrent all your music anyway, so who cares about that feature. Give them something they want Apple!

For more info, well you can look at any tech blog on the tech, but I recommend Gizmodo‘s Blog.

Did You Just Say Sony Out Sold Nintendo!

Believe it or not but it looks like the new PSP Slim might not have been such a bad idea at all for Sony, at least in Japan. After getting a thrashing from Nintendo with there DS/DS Lite, Sony has made a come back with the PSP Slim. For the number crunching people, who for them stats are like air, they sold over 250,000 units in 4 days. We will see if this little trend will last thought the rest of the planet.

For more info, goose step over to the Gizmodo Blog.