PSP Advance Freeware Review
Well, i read the hype, so i gave it a try, here are some of my thoughts.
The pspadvance is a lua based player, for tv, music, and a lot of other things. On installing, i noticed that there was a lot of worthless stuff and software included within a simple drag and drop. There were chatroom buttons, needless profiles, and a lot of garbage. Once i let the program install the PSPADV and PSPADV~1 dirs which i coulda done with a zip, i quickly uninstalled their worthless software. Now on to the acctual application.
The setup is as follows, you can try their program, with some occational ads as they say. Heres what i found.
First off, avi/divx/mpeg emulation is no where to be found. The one peice of video they do have which is a linken park video is also a cheat, the video itself contains no sound, there is a mp3 that plays along with it to give you the illusion of sound. So Video player function, basically worthless.
Secondly, MP3 playing is great, except for one amazingly big flaw. Ads pop up every min. If you try to delete the ads, the program will freeze when the ads are supposed to show. The mp3 visuals are good, but the adds kill the program and was the main reason i deleted it.
Third, clicking on their web browser claims their "program", which is acctually a collection of lua scripts, will be avalible on UMD soon. Not sure whether sony would support that, only time will tell.
Finally, their program that installs on your pc is horrible. why do i need a program to make my drag and drop of files easier. It basically ads lack of functionality.
As a 1.5 user, i think this would be a great program, a good web browser(even though all they have is a jpg of a browser) if a few things were changed.
1. Get rid of ads, within 2 songs i was sick of them, they are the same 6 ads, if i dont want it the first time, why would i want it the 10th. It was the main reason i deleted this program. If you want to make money, either make it pay only, even $10 would be a good buy if the next couple things are fixed as well.
2. Acctually get some kind of video working besides a little cheat running 1 avi file. I tried atleast 10 different videos with different bitrates and types and none worked. $10 would be worth a simple strong video player that could play divx/avi/xvid/mpg1/2.
3. Get ride of a bulky install. It placed 3 new icons on my desktop, it had to sync to my psp for no reason. Transferring files with it was a nightmare. Currently, the psp is open, drag and drop files, why they would want to make that MORE complicated, i have no idea.
Currently i would give this a 4 out of 10, it shows good base, but there are a few things glarring that make it basically to annoying to use. If they fix video, get ride of ads and simply make a better program, and get rid of their bulky install, and acctually play video, i would gladly pay 10$-20$ for it, and would rate it atleast a 9 out of 10.
As it stands, its basically an mp3 visualizer with ads. No REAL video or webbrowser implimentation. 4/10
