Rocky Mountain News are running an article about Sony’s PSP and what it’s actually good for. As a games machine it is technically peerless. It’s only competition is the Nintendo Gameboy DS, and the Sony machine has far more advanced graphics hardware. It’s let down by the lack of decent games. Since it’s launch 1 1/2 years ago, only 100 games are on the market worldwide. The decision to launch a proprietary disk standard and try to sell movies could have been a good one if they hadn’t got greedy. Because of their rarity, and poor pricing decisions by Sony and the other movie distributors, UMD movies are frequently more expensive than DVDs. Only a fool would pay more for a video he can only watch on a 4″ screen than for one he can watch anywhere there’s a DVD player.
I bought a PSP in the early days, before they came out in Europe and haven’t regretted it, for one reason: I bought a 1GB memory stick at the same time. What Sony have never promoted was it’s ability to play video and music off memory as well as UMDs. When I travel, I may bring a game along (GTA: Liberty City Stories usually), but I also use SimpleDivX & PSP Video 9 to convert movies from DVD format to DivX (which I retain on my PC’s hard disk, just in case), and then to a format that I can copy to the PSP. This way, I have a device in my coat pocket that I can store a couple of movies, a few CDs worth of music, and a game if I’m really stuck to keep my mind off how boring airports actually are.
It can get even better however. Since the platform was announced, indie developers have been writing their own games, emulators, and even complex applications to run on the platform, making it into a much more complex and feature rich device. I could have a pocketable device that along with the above, I could use to read email, track news feeds, IM, read eBooks and more. The big stumbling block however is DRM. Sony are a content producer as well as a technology company, so they will never produce technology that could impact the profitability of the other side of the business. These “homebrew” applications are written without the direct oversight (or income possibility) of Sony Corp., so they prevent “unsigned” code from running. Every time a way around the DRM is found, Sony close the loophole by releasing a new firmware revision with a minor feature enhancement. If you don’t update and close off the hole, you don’t get the feature. Newer games frequently require you to update your firmware before you can play the game too.
It’s a sledgehammer & wallnut approach in my opinion. It vastly cripples the hardware in order to protect a small part of the overall “package”. Removing the code signing requirement, and instead working on sandboxing the unsigned code, so they could have access to the wireless hardware, Memory Stick, RAM etc, but not the UMD media would protect their valuable movie/game content and open up the hardware to a series of new uses. It’s not a new idea. Java runs like that on every PC, so why can’t Sony do the same on the PSP?
A Swedish company called eXcito have just launched a low cost, mini home server called the bubba. It’s a Debian Linux server, running file, email and web services, with everything pre-installed, configured with a web browser, all in a tiny case. Today I do exactly the same with a P3, 512MB RAM, a SCSI RAID array and a rather large power supply. The bubba would do it all and only consume < 4 watts! Now if only it had built in Wi-Fi (my PCs are all over the house, and ethernet would be a nightmare, so the house is 100% 802.11g) it’d be perfect.
I’ve just acquired a 
My PC setup is actually looking pretty sexy now. Not a beige part to be seen. The monitor is black, the case, a