Moron bricks her kid's PSP and blames Sony

[Psyberjock]

Check out this crazy eBay user that bricker her kid's PSP then blames Sony for making a brickable device. HAHA... Yes, I think firmware updates are stupid too, but come on. When it says do not turn off the power, DO NOT TURN OFF THE POWER!

http://cgi.ebay.com/BRICKED-SONY-PSP...QQcmdZViewItem

How can a corporate giant like Sony kill the Christmas Spirit? By making a crappy engineering design like the Sony PSP.

I will preface the story with the fact that there is a happy ending. I'll save it for later.

My eight year old son has owned a PSP for a year and a half. He loved it. On Christmas Day, he received Eragon, and completely lost his mind in anticipation of playing it. As soon as we got home, he ran to his room and put it into his PSP.

Big mistake. Eragon requires a firmware upgrade, which apparently resides on the disk. In his haste, he began clicking through the screens to try to get the game to load, and asked me why it wouldn't play. Having no idea what it was doing, I turned it off. Even bigger mistake.

Now it may seem incredible, but this simple action completely renders the device useless. Google the words "Bricked PSP", and you'll see that the only option here is to send it back to Sony and they'll replace it for $89 with a "refurbished PSP" (someone else's bricked PSP, no doubt...).

I spent three days on the phone trying to get through with their Customer Service organization, and finally spoke to someone the other day. This happens all of the time, and if it's in warranty, it's free (except for postage, and the lost time...). For the poor lost slob with an eight year old trying to play a new game on Christmas, $90 will "fix" their simple engineering flaw.

What's the flaw you say? The flaw is that there is no way for a user to "recover" the firmware if they accidentally brick their PSP. There is nothing at all physically wrong with it, but the geniuses at Sony never considered the fact that someone might need to reinitialize one of their PSP systems (or perhaps they like the $90 fees they charge for it?) If you screw up your PC, you can format the disk and reinstall Windows. PSP has to be sent back to the factor, which is the only place that can actually write firmware to a bricked PSP. Brilliant design guys. How hard would it have been to add a recovery mode, huh?

So we talked about it. My son, hysterical that he had "bricked" his PSP by trying to play Eragon, needed to understand why I would never send Sony $90 to "fix" it. Nor will I ever spend another nickel of my hard earned money with that company ever again. If he had dropped it and broken it, he would have gotten the "take care of your things lecture". So what to do?

I told my son that I would replace his PSP with an XBox 360. It's bought and paid for, and he loves it. Eragon was opened, so it can't be returned (you'll see it with his other games listed...). We hooked it up to the HD TV and were blown away by how much better the XBox 360 is than Sony, and the fact that it can't be bricked by an eight year old sealed the deal. This PSP is mechanically perfect, and if you send it to Sony with your $90, they'll fix it.

I don't care what it sells for. I don't care what I get for the games. I just want it out of my house. You need to understand that it does not work as is, but is easily repariable if you subscribe to the fact that your child may inadvertantly "brick it" at a later date. If it doesn't sell, I'm going to throw it away. I'm just trying to recover some of the $450 that I sent to Target and Microsoft and not to Sony.

This PSP comes with everything that comes in the box... earbuds, battery, demo disc- everything must go. High bidder wins.

These are the kind of people that have too much money and not enough brains. She's also selling about 15 games.

Evolution has certainly taken a turn for the worse.

[razorak]

i like the idea of being able to recover the psp like reformatting a pc

tho i read a comment somewhere abt a guy working on a reflasher and a 3.00+ exploit but i'm not sure if it's true...hope it is tho...however the other half of me tells me it isn't. ptfh.

[steve-b]

If you could use some recovery method I'm sure it would be open to exploitation. Plus, if you RTFM, and had any technology sense, you would know switching off any kind of hardware when it is busy is a real bad idea.

[razorak]

btw wad's RTFM? my brain isn't functioning normally these days

[steve-b]

read the *cough* manual

[Man]

How, that poor kid. I think your being a little hard on the mother as well. She definatly does seem to know what shes talking about, but when you think about it, how was she supposed to know ? so why dont we all stop being so Hypocritical and remember that we were all at one point new to the PSP.

[steve-b]

I might have been new, but I made sure I knew what I was doing before I did anything with my expensive piece of kit. It's not just even PSP's...any kind of technology...
You are right, she does sound like she knows a bit about tech. so she really should have known better.

You can break your PC BIOS and no re-install is going to fix that, so her PC analogy is completely shot also.

[F9zDark]

If we had the option of a recovery mode from Sony, we'd all have gotten any firmware PSP and installed 1.5 on it ages ago and Sony would have quickly lost the homebrew war.

What I do love is how, rather than send the PSP to Sony for the fix (apparently its too expensive) she buys her son a $400 piece of equipment, and will get the same response from Micro$#@! if something bad happens to it out of warranty (I heard overheating is one of these things). She'll be too stupid to follow the instructions of allowing ample space for the unit to work and I gurantee that within in a month or two we'll see another Ebay sale for a bricked X360 and have to hear her sob story once again.

Stupid people should not be allowed to live.

[iniquitous_beast]

"I picked up the psp, and I saw a progress bar, along with the words 'do not turn off the psp'. Not knowing what that meant, I decided to turn off the psp".

Essentially, that is what the woman was saying. When I see a non-exitable screen with a progress bar, I do the smart thing and wait until the bar reaches 100%.

Firmware updates only take about 1.5 minutes to complete. That kid was horribly impatient. Still, I share the mother's opinions about a recovery mode. The psp would be better to have one

[pt9087]

HAHA thats funny