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The PSP - Sony's Missed Opportunity
C|Net passes on the words of Forrester analyst James McQuivey, who lambasts Sony for failing to live up to the opportunity the PSP presented. Though the handheld has certainly been doing better of late, it's hard not to point out that the PlayStation Portable's sales numbers flag in the face of the DS's incredible popularity. McQuivey also makes a point of stating how well the system could have done at taking a slice of Apple's death-grip on the downloadable media market. "'The thing is, Sony could have been all this,' McQuivey said. 'The Sony PSP is one of the best portable entertainment media devices that anyone has come up with in years. It has a relatively big screen, plays video beautifully, has good storage and audio. It could have been the first big mobile carrier for TV shows and movies.' Instead, the mobile-video play of one of the world's largest electronics companies is straggling behind Apple, has shaken the confidence of supporters--especially in Hollywood--and added to the woes of CEO Howard Stringer."
Help me out here. Video iPods have either 30GB or 80GB of storage built in. The PSP has freaky non standard "disks" that users can't burn or proprietary flash storage that nobody outside of Sony uses, nothing built in.
In other words the Movie industry is hoping Sony succeeds because Sony will help "protect their profits", largely by forcing users to repurchase their movie collections and pay through the nose for any entertainment they want to watch. Any wagers on why the iPod with a smaller screen and bigger price tag is winning? Maybe consumers aren't the idiots Slashdot'ers think they are?
Let's not forget the many asinine "security updates" they force fed to us early adopters to keep the homebrew developers from actually adding something useful to that oversized (physically), overpriced (duh), underwhelming (storage) "wish I was a video iPod." I thought they had pulled their collective heads out of their asses, but now that the latest updated supports PS1 downloads, but *only* via another overpriced POS, the PS3, I see that nothing has changed. They made their bed. Lie in it, Sony.
:(
Yeah, I agree, the storage has to be the worst thing about the system, overall. UMD was a joke, right? $20 a pop for less movie/features than a standard DVD... MemoryStick?! Waste of money.
It *could* have been a contender, but it's only a nice widescreen legacy now.
Way to make every wrong turn, Sony... the one and only.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Yes, but this doesn't help the console. If Sony would evaluate their options from the consumer's point of view, we could very easily have these features come standard on the PSP. Instead clever individuals like Dark Alex are engaged in an "arms war" of sorts where each month a new incremental firmware is released by Sony in an attempt to keep end users from taking full advantage of, for example, the PS1-PSP capabilities. The scene is forced underground, and the average consumer is kept unaware of what functionality is possible with the PSP.
I personally have a PSP and must say that being able to play FFVII in full speed on the road is nothing short of amazing. I would have easily put down $10-20 for this capability. The unfortunate part for Sony is that they still doesn't realize that *enabling* the consumer is what sells products, not disabling features from them.
"Add on top of that the fact that BluRay is outselling HDDVD signifigantly..."
Remember how Betamax was *THE* video tape format early on but lost out to VHS in the long term because VHS machines were more widely and cheaply available. Many people assume it was porn but in fact it was price. HD DVD still has an opportunity to do the same so I don't think the current rates of BD sales are any reason the claim the format has won.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"