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The Future of the PSP
IGN has a longish piece up looking at the possible future of Sony's handheld. They examine the upcoming success of Sony's overshadowed creation via several excellent interviews from people with SCEA, first-party developers, third-party studios, and indies. I particularly enjoyed the comments by indie homebrew dev Fanjita, who had a great outsider's view of the little black dynamo. "I suspect there are 2 factors that make them especially resistant to homebrew on the PSP - the first is that point I just made, about not wanting to dent the already shaky platform image. The second is that we already know our way around almost all the PSP internals, and so they probably feel that there's a risk that a publicly endorsed, restricted homebrew platform would soon be cracked wide open, leaving them with an officially endorsed route to piracy. I like to believe that the capable homebrew devs would be respectful of a move from Sony to open up the platform, but it's obviously impossible to have any guarantees."
Even those who disagree with you can get the gaming device and the multimedia shit cheaper than a PSP. Try the $40 R4DS adapter, which lets you run DS homebrew from microSD cards on all revisions of the Nintendo DS. One of these homebrew programs is called MoonShell, which lets you watch DPG video (based on MPEG-1, converted from anything that Media Player Classic will play), listen to MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and tracked music, look at pictures, and read text files on the DS.
Meanwhile, Sony releases PSP firmware updates that close more holes.