PSP2 Not Coming Any Time Soon

Gamespot reports on the rumours swirling about a possible second edition of the PSP. The verdict: Bogus. From the article: "The PSM article does cite 'PSP developers who have been briefed on Sony's plans' as saying that the handheld will have 'a high degree of connectivity' with the PlayStation 3--something Sony has stated publicly on numerous occasions. Also, 'sources familiar with its development' confirmed the new PSP would be 'thinner and lighter' than the current model. However, that's all the article said was set in stone, and PSM is upfront about the rest being speculative."

Comments

What they need to do

[dalmiroy2k]

_ Stop being so restrictive with homebrew projects, just look away like Nintendo does.
_ Release a PC/Mac UMD reader and writer and a Dual DVD-UMD player for the living room.
_ Sell cheap blank media ($2 a writable disc).
_ Sell your current UMD movie stock for $5 each. Include them with Sony DVD releases for free.
_ Larger battery life.
_ Learn from Nintendo. Touchscreen it's the solution.

Anyway I don't expect anything from Sony these days. I will just watch them crash and burn.

Re:What they need to do

[puppetman]

Regarding homebrew - that issue with the NCAA 2007 football game, where a critical bug was released, EA had two solutions (this from a friend who works at EA) - replace all the UMDs, or allow it to be patched. The second would have opened a hole in the BIOS for all time (allowing code to be run from a memory stick), as future BIOSs would need to be backwards compatible. Unfort, they decided to replace UMDs (via snail-mail).

I don't think a UMD reader/writer would have done much - a reusable 1 gig memory stick is pretty cheap now.

UMD movies for $5 would be cool, but that doesn't screw consumers out of enough money.

The battery works ok for me, and there are better batteries after-market.

I thought the touchscreen on the DS was stupid when I first saw it. I've revised that opinion to the point where I wish I had a DS, not a PSP.

I think what they really need to do is get a decent developer kit out to the game companies early (both large and small companies - not just the EAs of the world); this is biting them in the ass for the PS3 as well, I've heard. Hopefully this will result in some good games. Right now, there are a handful of good games, and most of them are racing games (and most of those are ports of PS2 games). Kind of limits playability if that's not what you're interested in.

Re:What they need to do

[RyoShin]

_ Learn from Nintendo. Touchscreen it's the solution.

This is a big misconception.

It's not really that Nintendo included a touchscreen on the handheld that made it a hit, it's that they included something more. Instead of just creating a more powerful Gameboy, they went above your general controller scheme to add in new functionality.

That's why it does so well. It gives the consumer more than the 'standard', while the PSP gives just gives the 'standard' (except with better graphics). If Sony added a light sensor, a motion sensor, some sort of camera with pattern recognization, anything like that into the PSP (or PSP2), then it would catch on better. As it is, the PSP is basically a much more powerful better Game Boy Advance, which is why it lacks sales.

Does this really surprise anyone?

[grapeape]

Handhelds usually have a longer life than consoles, the PSP has just really started to gain momentum with a recent flood of games at much higher quality than the early stuff. UMD may have failed as a movie format (I still argue it could survive if standalone recorders and players were made available) but its sufficient for game distribution, switching to an all memory stick format would do nothing but make Sony's already mostly wasted battle for control over piracy that much more difficult. UMD adds at least a rudimentary level of security, yes its hackable for the most part but doing so is extremely difficult without knowing where to look and how to do it. Lots of people on here talk about homebrew and PSP hacks but outside the geek community there are very very few that even know its possible.

What I think is odd is that Nintendo never seems to do anything about piracy other than sue websites blatently selling pirate devices, yet the still have GBA and DS games in the top 10 almost every month and outsell Sony in most countries. If Sony put half the money in game development that they do in hardware redesigns which add nothing they could probably have a more competative library of games to increase the sales of their hardware.

It really seems sometimes like Sony has a Kamakazi view of marketing...protect the "idea" at the cost of self sacrifice. It happened with Betamax, it happened with MiniDisk (they finally opened that one up but it was too late), it happened with Memory sticks (sony is mostly the only company that uses them), it happened with UMD and I would bet the next victim of their own arrogance is going to be BlueRay. Its like they just never learn. Sony seems to obsess over the idea of owning a "standard" so much so that they pretty much destroy any chance of the new product becoming a standard before it has a chance.