Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) Value Pack

So, the original plan was to buy the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) and then immediate flip it on eBay. Then I saw the little sticker on the box that said it came with a copy of SpiderMan 2, full length and only modified to fit the PS screen. And I thought, hmmm… wonder how good that is?

So, I kept it and opened it up and popped in the movie. Then my jaw dropped. The video is pretty damn good, just shy of DVD quality to my eyes. Battery life is about 3-5 hours, which should be enough to watch a whole movie or two on a cross country flight. It uses normal headphones, but uses a proprietary disc format called UMD. The guys at the store mentioned that movies can be downloaded to the Memory Stick, but I suspect I’d need a 512MB MemoryStick Duo to make that remotely useful for a feature film. But, the interesting thing is that I can pop in Duo’s from my camera (not that I have Duo’s in my camera, just regular MemoryStick PROs). On my list of things to figure out is whether the PSP can act as a host for the camera, allowing me to look at the pictures on the brighter/bigger PSP screen.

PSP Need for Speed: Underground Rivals

The game play is pretty solid. I’ve played around with one before, but it was a golf game that really didn’t push the controls around much. This time around, I got Need for Speed: Underground Rivals to push this baby around and jam on the controls a bit. All I can say is nice job, Sony. The device is comfortable and fits well in my hands. The only complaint I have is that the analog controller is a bit odd and will take some time to get used to. I understand why they didn’t model it after the typical analog controllers found on game controllers, so I’m not criticizing the decision.

Next major feature: It supports WiFi out of the box, but I had some issues getting on my network. In fact, this was the biggest headache of all. I had it resolved within 30 minutes, if that says anything, but still I’m disappointed in the process here. The wireless connection software requires some specific settings on the router and unfortunately, the errors only come back with cryptic codes.

For example, my wireless network is set to use shared key security (WEP is enabled). Well, apparently, the PSP requires open network security. The error message that informed me of this was generic and only gave me this code as a specific reason: 80410D09 . Helpful, huh? After I Googled around for that, I fixed it and tried again. New error: 80110482 . WTF? While poking around, I retried the connection and magically it worked. Turns out the error has something to do with not getting a DHCP response (getting an IP address from the router’s DHCP server). I think I may have tried to test it too soon after changing the settings on the router… it was probably still trying to restart.

I still have yet to actually try to get on the Internet. Need For Speed was having trouble finding other drivers to race against online, but I’m not exactly sure why. Something else to look into.

So, I’m pretty much floored at this point. I think the move of including a movie instead of a full game is brilliant because it gets people thinking about the device differently that the Nintendo stuff that we’re all so familiar with. In fact, I’m more excited right now about using this as a cheap portable movie player and photo viewer than I am about anything else.

What will be interesting is whether movies will be available from the other studios aside from the Sony labels. Quite honestly, I haven’t been paying attention to this space at all. I’m sure the answer could be had for a bit of Googling, but this is a device that will do better with some openness. Of course, they could always go the iTMS route and stick with allowing people to download DRM’ed movies to their computers by leveraging the Duo’s. Mark Cuban (yeah, that Mark Cuban) wrote a while back about how he was able to watch DVD quality feature films from a USB flash drive. In fact, I walk around most days with at least a 1GB flash drive in my pocket. It’s how I transport work between home and office and music back and forth (wish iTunes had a “sync” feature).

Sony could use this device as Apple has used the iPod and iTMS if they can get the breadth of video content. It would be a fascinating move, especially if they could offer different formats for different devices in the home. I’d rather have a higher quality download for my TV than I would for the PSP. This would be very cool if they can pull this off.

I thought about the implications of this as I was getting over my initial excitement and wondered about the benefits of openness vs. proprietary standards. Most technologists would reflexively tell you that being open or using an open standard is better than using a proprietary spec. Yet today, we have a couple of examples where proprietary is beating open hands down: the iPod/iTMS combo and the video game market.

It seems to me that the maturity of a market is a defining characteristic of when openness matters. With the web, for example, we’re heading toward more standardization and openness than we’ve had since the very early days. Around the Netscape era, everyone was happy to use the Netscape extensions (blink tag, anyone?) because that was the only way to get new features. They were driving the market. As the market matures, we’re seeing more thought being applied to creating standards before implementing them. XHTML and CSS specs are now both ahead of the implementations, meaning that the road map for browser developers is out there… no need to make up proprietary stuff.

The online music store market is still relatively young, obviously, which is why iTMS seems to do so well. People are just happy to have a place to actually go shop and get the music they want at a price they can deal with that they’re willing to accept the restrictions of having the best portable MP3 player and a very good selection of music. If Sony were to get into the downloadable market via their online media store, I think they might enjoy the same advantages as Apple has in the music space. They’re first and they’re making it work. The gadget is amazing, and the use cases are there. I kinda hope this makes it.

(while I was writing, I decided to do a quick Google… looks like the mothership is going to release some movies on UMD, but they’re the only non-Sony shop to have signed up. I think this is Sony’s major disadvantage, if I can call it that… they’re a competitor with people they need to partner with, and I wonder if that makes it harder for them to make deals?)