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."

Comments

Has Good Storage?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

has good storage

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.

Add homebrew unfriendly to the list!

[countSudoku()]

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. :(