Sony PSP Review

PSP and UMD Drive

While I was in Detroit last week, I decided to do a little shopping. I had read some reviews on the PSP and I told myself that if I was lucky enough to find a store that still had some in stock I was going to have to purchase one. I went to the obvious places first, Best Buy, Circuit City, Media Play…No dice! So before grabbing something to eat and getting back to the hotel I decided to try the local Toys R’ Us and to my surprise they had some in stock. I should have asked how many but my guess was only a few since they are selling out everywhere. So $250 later I had myself a Sony PSP. I have had it for about 4 days now and here is my take on it thus far…

Look and Feel
As with most Sony products it doesn’t feel cheap at all. The 260 gram unit gives me the feeling that if I dropped it there is a good chance that I couldn’t put humpty dumpty together again. It is a little heavier than I would prefer for excess use, however with extra weight comes extra stability, so if your playing with it while on a plane or in a car the extra weight helps to steady things a bit. As far as the looks, before even turning the unit on people tend to stare with awe. It does look pretty impressive. One thing that I did not have a good feeling about was the UMD (Universal Media Disc) loading. The UMD is basically a minidisc inside of a cartridge and you have to load it tape deck style. You slide over a lever which basically opens the back of the PSP up and you can put your UMD in, push down, and close it. This worked fine for me every time but I foresee many people having issues with loading UMD’s in the future. As with most portable devices I think they should leave as many physically moving parts out of the design as possible. From looking at the way it was built, the first problems will most likely come from users not being able to keep the door to the UMD slot shut. The metal latch will bend or break and the UMD drive will become useless. The second wave of complaints will come in the form of users (or should I say abusers) that have their UMD loader open and then somehow manage to break it off. I am not about to test the weight load it can handle, but no doubt there will be users who bend and or break the door off of the back of the PSP, once again rendering their UMD drive useless. Overall with the exception of the UMD drive I really love the look and feel of the PSP.

User Interface and Functionality
Upon turning it on you get a nice looking and sounding startup screen. It then continues to load into the main navigation screen. The user interface is beyond awesome. It has a very futuristic feel and is very responsive. No waiting for screens to load, etc… The screen is unbelievable and I could go on for hours describing the quality that you get when watching Spidey 2 on UMD, but you’re going to have to see it to believe it. For those of you who haven’t done your homework on what exactly the PSP is capable of, here is a quick rundown. Games, Music, Movies, Photos, and Wireless Internet Access. I am not a gamer by a long shot so as funny as it may sound, gaming was the last thing that attracted me to the PSP. However game play does seem pretty cool, there are plenty of sites out there with great reviews on the PSP games though so I am not going to go into that. What I really want to cover is the Movies, Music, Photos, and Internet capability.

With a screen of quality this high it was a no brainier to consider releasing movies for the PSP. I am sure however that the market of PSP users wanting to buy UMD movies will be fairly small. Where I do see this being a possibility is airport rentals. Due to the small size of the UMD’s and the small size of the PSP I see a great opportunity for the DVD rental vendors at airports to rent out the UMD’s as they do with DVD’s currently. The fact of the matter is no one is only going to want to watch movies on their PSP, and since the movies are created specifically for the PSP’s 480×272 screen people would probably rather rent the UMD’s out for trips and return them at their destination.

UMD’s however are only one way to get media onto your PSP. Memory stick DUO’s are also compatible with the PSP. By placing Movies, Music, or Photos into the correct folders on your memory stick you are able to pull up the data through the PSP. Photo Quality and Sound is pretty great overall, I think the missing link in this whole setup is cheap mass storage. In order to store a television show or two on your PSP you’re going to need a couple hundred dollars worth of storage. The ability to use the USB port on the top of the PSP to plug in a USB drive (thumb or external HD) would be amazingly awesome. For instance I could plug my ipod into the PSP and have 40GB worth of movies or music at my fingertips. As of now however you will have to pay between $100 and $150 for a 1GB Memory Stick Duo card. This is way too pricey and one of my biggest complaints about the PSP. Another thing that could be improved is the music capabilities of the PSP. The interface is based purely upon the folder system that you put together yourself, no index or anything; this makes the end user do a lot more work than needed. A cool addition to the PSP would be to upgrade the firmware to support Napster To Go. I have a Napster To Go account and if I could push my music over to my PSP it would make me as giddy as a school girl watching The O.C. (Ok so I get giddy watching The O.C. as well).

One final complaint that I have is that Sony so stupidly decided that they didn’t want to follow suit and make this device chargeable by USB. So many devices that are coming out are chargeable via USB which I find totally wonderful, when I go on a trip I simply bring a USB cable and one of my wall to USB plugs and I am all set, or if I am on the road and my laptop has a good charge but my cell phone is dead I just plug it into my laptop and get a charge off of it. Since there is already a device USB port on top of the PSP I think they overlooked a great opportunity to consolidate ports and it would give them a better reason to include a USB Cable (not currently included) to connect the PSP to the PC.

Conclusion
Overall I think I am being a bit too hard on the little guy. It is an awesome device and I cannot wait until we can get Linux on this thing, the possibilities are endless…