theMediaman.com

I got my PSP back from the repair shop, and still have the freezing problem. Apparently, other people are too. Some people are getting it from running homebrew (custom) software but others, including myself, continue to have the system freeze when exiting a game. Really irritating.

There’s a function on the PSP to connect to the Wireless LAN and see if there’s any new update, and as of last night, there is. If you go to the PSP web site, they still have the 2.82 firmware posted. Following last week’s release of the PlayStation 3, there’s the 3.0 firmware for the PSP. Nowhere near as revolutionary as the 2.0 software was, it still has some promising new features… almost entirely dependent on whether or not you have the top-of-the-line PS3.

Features like playing movies or music from your PS3, and playing a limited number of PlayStation 1 games on your PSP is great, but you need to have the more expensive of the two models offered. The “cheaper” option has a 20 GB hard drive and no built-in Wireless LAN capability.

This is particularly annoying because I’ve been trying with limited success to keep myself from getting too hyped up about the possibility of playing Final Fantasy VII on my PSP. The Nintendo DS is supposed to have classic NES/SNES games you can download for about $7. I’d pay $10, even $20 for the chance to play that game on-the-go. I never had a PS1, so there are a lot of games I never got to play but wanted to. I would have few reservations about plunking down ten bucks to play any one of them.

But if it’s going to cost $700 to play ten year old games, I don’t think so. From a few articles I’ve read about the very few details surrounding the downloadable games, you’ll need to connect to the “Sony Network Store” through the PlayStation 3.

That sucks.

Sony has had a bad year… a very bad year for publicity. The PSP is losing to the DS as the gamers handheld of choice. Opening up the entire PS1 catalog (or even 1/10th of the collection) for on-the-go play would reestablish Sony’s footing, and get people to graduate from the PSP to the PS3, rather than PS3 owners seeing the PSP as a clever “toy” or “accessory” for their new console. It worked for Apple. Millions of iPod sales turned into a growth in the iMac sales.

The argument for why the PS3 will succeed is largely based on what happened with the release of the PS2. It was released a year after the Dreamcast, was far more expensive, but had the “cool thing” of a built-in DVD player and it was backwards compatible with old PS1 games. It worked for Sony in the end, but can they pull off that trick again?

Rootkit fiasco, exploding batteries, and the wealth of problems with PS3 before and after launch. Will Sony get anything right this year?