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Sony to PSP Owners: Just Adapt
Cymoro writes "In an article Gamespot posted recently Ken Kutaragi, Sony Computer Entertainment president, was quoted in a japanese business magazine about the PSP square button defect as saying "There may be people that complain about its usability, but that's something which users and game software developers will have to adapt to." Apparently, flaws are a feature."
If the button mechanism had to be placed further to the right than the button itself, why didn't they just make the PSP more wide by that small amount of distance? It probably wouldn't have increased the width by a noticable amount.
If it was produced to specifications, then I have some questions for whomever forced those specifications all the way past the play-testing phase.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
I passed this quote around the office, and one guy mentioned that it reminded him of the Falling Waters building, which is apparently the most gorgeous building in the world but has so many issues that pretty much nobody wants it.
This is because Sony is just refusing to TAKE anything but the most extreme cases. For instance, you have to have more than 7 dead pixels in a 1 cm square area for them to accept it as a problem and allow you to return it. With stupid, self-serving policies like that, I can see why only 0.6% of them have been returned.
Fact of the matter is, if you read any Japanese gamer BBS, the PSP's defects are *extremely* widespread and rather bad. Analog sticks fall off. The drive launches discs like a ninja star if you hold the console incorrectly. That's presuming the drive will even close properly -- some of them are warped and will not snap shut all the way. The screens have bubbles, dead pixels, and dust in them. Buttons, not just the Square button, but all of them, stick on a regular basis. And there appears to be an OS bug with the device -- it looks like it doesn't clean out it's streaming buffers when discs are changed, which leads to music, at the very least, becomming rather messed up if you switch games.
So yeah. Sony can claim only 5000 machines were defective and needed repair, but these are jerks that are saying that an obvious design flaw is a feature (and since they're geniuses and we're just peons, we should shut up and accept it) and jerks who said that the battery life of the darn thing was "6-8 hours" (more like 2-3)... so I wouldn't trust anything out of their mouth that's not backed up with a lot of supporting data.