How Could Sony Improve the PSP

[motormaniac]

i think they should have a digital camera built in. also be able to stream music and videos w/ out buying all that stuff. and a 2 gig harddrive ! and maybe a keyboard that pops out of the bottom, kinda like the umd thing ! i typed this from my 2.6!

[andrewgabriel77]

2 analog sticks, camera, built in hdd, keyboard, built in mic, cell modem....that would make it un-beatable

[kaoss-b]

-Allow Homebrew to run (limited, no ISOs)
-Hear Music and watch images at the same time
-No Autorun
-Maybe a camera

I think these things would be great

[stellarola]

Better refresh rate, it needs it for faster paced games.

[Chazzmos]

If they just could throw out the UMD unit and put in a microdrive small HD on 20 gb would just be great. Althou then I'd feel sorry for Sony, couse then they'd go downhill, just as they're doing now :O

Yeah, I've been thinking about that lately... Basically UMDs suck a bit. They take a long time to access and the drive is flimsy. Traditionally new medias die, CDs and DVDs are the only stalwarts of discs. Does anyone still use a minidisc player?

[b8a]

Yeah, I agree with those of you who have made posts about the rediculous limitations of the PSP. Anybody who knows anything about internal affairs at Sony knows that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and the PSP is proof positive of this.

They've made this incredible system and give it an incredible ammount of security, but all they give us is mediocre (at best) games that aren't even worthy of that level of security. The PSP has been available for over a year now and it seems like Sony is far more interested in fighting would-be pirates than they are in making quality games. The end result: they sold me my PSP at a loss hoping to make up money in the games I buy, but they haven't released any games that I want so I haven't bought any games. And then, to further compound the problem, they want to force me to upgrade to play the newest games, so chances are that when a game comes out that I actually do want to buy and play, I won't be able to because the homebrew functionality is FAR more important to me.

And this isn't an issue of ISO's with me. I've never even used one, because, like I said I haven't seen any games for the PSP that look worthy of my money, much less my time. Rather, it's because I have far more everyday use for a programmable, portable media player than I do for a mediocre game machine that has crippled 2D games capabilities. And since I've never been able to get into full 3D games the way I did with 2D ones, emulators playing all of my old favorites are preferable to the newest, flashiest, but ultimately less interesting 3D games.

I'm sure that Sony will release many more firmware updates in the future (we all know that an official Flash player is in the works), and some of those updates may be rather enticing, but there's no way I'm giving up homebrew compatibility and Sony's going to have to make some major change to the hardware in order for me to justify buying a second PSP. A/V output. Built in hard drive. Better battery life. Cut 2D game makers some slack and make it easier to run 2D games on the hardware. It needs to be more solidly built. But, more than anything for me, it needs to offer MD compatibility. I'm probably alone on this board in this opinion, but MDs are only SLIGHTLY larger than UMDs, so the fact that the PSP can't use them is entirely and unfathomably rediculous. My library of MDs is larger than my library of MP3s and I have no plans to spend countless hours converting, which means that I have to clunk around BOTH a PSP and an MD player. Thankfully both are relatively small, but, come on, Sony's the major purvayor of MD technology, you'd think they'd try to support their own internal interests. Yeah, UMDs in and of themselves are a doomed, flawed technology, but why did Sony go out of their way to make a format so similar and yet totaly different from their pre-existing one?? (Just read Chazzmos' post and while MDs never really cought on outside of Japan, there are millions of Japanese who own stacks of MDs and could sympathize with my frustration. I suspect that Sony could help out their Japanese PSP sales by fixing this incompatibility issue since the Japanese public is notoriously obsessed with convergance and compact, portable technologies. Just look at the tremendous success of the game boy micro. It didn't offer anybody anything new, but people snatched it up over there simply because it was easier to carry and therefore more convenient to use. Spend a few hours riding the trains in Japan and you'll see just how popular MDs still are over there, and the missed potential for the PSP to replace so many of those devoted MD players which can't do anything but play music)

But then again, they've had memory sticks for years and they're only beginning to implement the technology in their very successful game products. Honestly, Sony either needs to get their act togeather or just entirely break up into smaller, specialized, focused companies. I personally think the Nintendo DS is a bulky joke, but it's games lineup and the ammount of users out there are making me take a second look (I'd never get one though... that whole dual screen setup is just way too gimickish to me.). Sony should be ashamed. There's no reason it should be this way...

Several people have mentioned PDA features... These would be great, but I'd like to take that one step further. I would easily plop down an extra $400 if I could run full versions of Photoshop or Illustrator, or any of my other oft-used software on the PSP. I have more fun with those software packages than I do with most of the games that are being released these days.

[stormuk]

Remember children its a games machine not a pc!

[Psphreak]

I gotta do something with the memory cards issue, ITS JUST PISSING ME OFF, I bought a 1 gig sony mem card, and got 950mb instead of 1024 mb, I tried mailing them in their site, no email supplied!, I'm going to make a sign list, the everyone will add their names, and I'll send it to them, It's ****ing annoying me!

This is NOT the issue with memory cards. It's just the overhead of the FAT system that takes up that space. Haven't you noticed when you get a hard drive that it says 40 Gigs, but after formatting you only get (usable) about 38 gigs?

[htn85]

I gotta do something with the memory cards issue, ITS JUST PISSING ME OFF, I bought a 1 gig sony mem card, and got 950mb instead of 1024 mb, I tried mailing them in their site, no email supplied!, I'm going to make a sign list, the everyone will add their names, and I'll send it to them, It's ****ing annoying me!

that's not really an 'issue'. you should have checked on sony's memory stick website to see how much end-user memory capacity is available on the 1gig stick before you bought it. i have a sandisk with only 942mb end-user capacity. it's the same deal with all memory sticks/cards (i.e. my 256mb TransFlash/microSD only ends up having 249mb end-user capacity). if you checked your computer's HDD as well, it would have less space than commercially specified (i.e. mine is a 60GB HDD and only 58GB is end-user capacity).

[MaxSMoke]

Legitimate Homebrew Support.