I’m back! It turns out the “instant cancer” from the last update wasn’t the JB Weld’s fault, but rather the first stirrings of some kind of mil-spec flu bug. I’m mostly back together now. Sister Nyquil and Brother Toilet Bowl got me through the rough times.

PSP Review
So I promised myself that I wouldn’t be a total gadget-whore and run out to buy a PSP on release day (last Thursday). I kept that promise for about 8 hours. Then I went out and bought one. It really is something else. The most surprising thing about it is that Sony *didn’t* screw it up too badly.

First of all, some pictures. The front of the machine is fiendishly hard to photograph, so here’s some nice, high-rez shots from Ferrago.

Bummer number one: Sony simply cannot help themselves; they are hopelessly addicted to inventing new formats. They have a special love for wierd little disc-inside-cartridge things. Behold the Universal (uh-huh) Media Disc:

CD provided for scale. It’s basically a shrunken Minidisc without a shutter. It has a little access window on the bottom, otherwise known as “the part of the disc your fingers will instinctively be drawn to”:

They hold around 2 gigs, which is impressive. They’re read-only, which is annoying. Sony is supposedly going to use UMD for other things than shipping games; they’re planning to release full-length movies in the format as well. In fact, the box comes with a copy of Spiderman 2. I have a sneaking suspicion that plan is going to last about as long as pre-recorded Minidiscs (both of them). For game storage, and other purposes (more about those later), there’s a slot in the PSP for yet another Sony format, the Memory Stick Duo:

Okay, flash media is officially getting way too small. In fact, the manual warns you not to leave the Memory Stick in the reach of small children, lest they choke on it.

It plays games pretty well. I picked up Wipeout Pure since I’ve been a fan of the Wipeout franchise since way back, and Lumines (pronounced like it has a “ce” on the end of it, not like “loo-mines”). They’re both quite nice for launch titles, and pave the way toward some really good future gameage. Loading times aren’t horrible, either.

A couple features really stand out, at least in my nerdy brain. First of all, yes, the screen is as nice as everybody says. It’s lovely, bright, and refreshes quick without much ghosting that I can see. It’s actually a bit too nice for its own good – the highly reflective surface picks up dust and fingerprints like nobody’s business. The machine comes with a little cleaning cloth so that anal-retentives such as myself can spend ridiculous amounts of time keeping it perfectly spotless. Note: you can’t.

Second big thing – WiFi. You can play wirelessly with whomever happens to be standing around, in an ad-hoc mode; or you can attach to an access point and play over the Internet. I’m sure it will have other uses than just multiplayer gaming.

Big thing the third – you can run software from the Memory Stick. This is huge for the homebrew crowd. The first step in every game console reverse engineering project is to figure out how to get your own code to sit on the machine – on the PSP, there’s a folder on the Memory Stick called “Games” and a menu item to run stuff from the Stick. I’m guessing that whatever binaries go in there have to be blessed in some way to make the PSP approve of them (I’m guessing signed binaries – the “About PSP” credits screen includes a mention of “RSA BSAFE Cryptographic Software” – could just be for the web browser, could be for other stuff). Sony could make the homebrew community incredibly happy by releasing some details on how to get your own stuff to run, but realistically the community will figure it out with or without Sony’s help.

Big thing number four – media. Sony’s been frothing at the mouth about how the PSP is not just a game console, it’s a “convergent portable entertainment device”, whatever that means. Oddly enough, though, it’s pretty good at the multimedia stuff. You can dump MP3s onto the Memory Stick all day and play them (with a very nice interface I might add). A few years ago, a Sony product that could do this would have come with some ridiculously named “Sony Music Transfer MegaGateway” that you had to install to convert your music into some lamebrained format only their device could understand. As it stands now, the PSP manual tells you to make a folder called MUSIC on the Memory Stick and drag your MP3s in it. Amazing! It’s not just music though, you can do pictures and video, too. It will view ordinary JPGs, but it’s a bit pickier about movies. It only understands MPEG4. At least it’s a standard (and not a Sony “standard”). In fact, there’s already a very nice third-party application called PSP Video that easily transcodes any format video you might have into MPEG4 and copies it to the right place on the Memory Stick’s filesystem. Just for grins, I dragged a file from my ReplayTV onto PSP Video – in a minute or two, it had converted and copied it to the Memory Stick, resulting in the following nugget of portable depression:

Johnny Cash’s “Hurt”, copied from ReplayTV to PSP

Bummer #2 – you need a bigger Memory Stick to make this feature useful. That three minute music video fills up most of the space on the included 32 MB card. For a movie, or even a couple episodes of your favorite shows, you’re going to need a couple of these. Now admittedly, $110 is not too bad for a gig of flash, but it’s not chump change seeing as you just plunked down $250 for the console. This is probably the best strategic decision they could have made though; flash is going to get progressively cheaper as time goes by, and it has less of a size and power consumption penalty than, say, an ittybitty hard drive.

Overall, it’s pretty neat. It feels like picking up a piece of the future. I can’t want to see what the homebrew guys figure out what it can do. Recommended.

For tomorrow, a concert writeup, featuring Matter and Charlie Manson’s Happy Funtime Band (note: not actual band name).