Why Sony's PSP Will Disappoint
While the rest of the world has been going on and on about the upcoming Sony Playstation Portable, the folks at GearLive have published an excellent piece on why the PSP will disappoint (or as they colorfully put it, "Why Sony's PSP Will Suck".) Here are some highlights from this excellent piece:

Let’s talk first about the recently announced price. $250 is a big slap to all of our faces. Not because the PSP isn’t worth the cash, but because of all the useless accessories Sony decided to bundle with the system. Apparently American’s are too stupid to purchase better alternatives. They need to be spoon-fed everything. News Flash Sony: When I bought my Playstation2 it didn’t come bundled with a memory card. I had to buy that on my own. It also didn’t come with a bundled movie to show off the DVD capability. Because of all the accessories, Sony had to raise the price to $250.

1 GB Cards are so expensive. Sandisk offers the cheaper variety, but even those will run you close to $150. And you’ll need a 1 GB if you plan on enjoying a decent amount of MP3’s on your handheld, or if you plan on watching movies with it. Some of the movies I have encoded to MP4 are larger than 650 MB, so a 512 MB card isn’t an option. SD cards are half the price, and even cheaper after rebates. But no, Sony wants to shaft the public with their proprietary standards once again. In fact, if you decide to purchase a 1 GB Sony Pro Duo card, you’ll be paying more than $300. Go you!

The games are going to range from $40 to $50. Awesome, so after they gouge us with the system price, they gouge us again with the software. And this is UMD we’re talking here folks. It doesn’t cost Sony much to put out these diskettes, as compared to physical cartridges on other systems.

There’s no killer app. How many times have we already played Ridge Racer on our home systems? Same for every other game being released near the launch window: they’re all ports (with some fancy mini games to avoid Sony’s no-ports rule). Even the game I want the most: WipeOut Pure rehashes four levels from previous installments. Where is the SSX of the bunch? Where’s the Halo, the WaveRace64, the Soul Calibur, the Resident Evil 4? I don’t mean these franchises, but I mean a title that says: “You want me now, and you will spend $300 of your hard-earned cash on me.” The closest thing we’re getting to something unique is Mercury, and that doesn’t even have randomly generated puzzles, so replayability is questionable.

Movie conversion to MP4 is a royal pain. It takes three pieces of software: one to rip a film , one to convert it to AVI, and yet another to convert the AVI to an MP4. Here’s the best part. No one has figured out how to get movies to the native resolution of the PSP wide-screen. So when you’re playing your MP4, you’ll need to stretch the video to get the ratio right. It still looks decent, but it’s not native and therefore not as good as it could have been. Rumor has it that Sony sloppily borrowed the MP4 utility from its Clie PDA software suite. Thanks.

The headphone and remote cord is a travesty. Okay, let me see if I can find the logic here. The color for both these items is white. Sony figured that you needed to be down with the iPod crowd, so they chose a similar color, which will make you look as cool as those Apple commercials will lead you to believe. Except if you look at the color of the PSP itself, it’s….well…it’s black. The cord colors don’t even match with the system! You won’t get the best sound out of the included earbuds either. Yeah, I know I was shocked too.

For the complete PSP rant, click here. Couldn't have put it better myself.


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