The Best of Both Phone, and Tablet
December 17, 2005 1:51 AM PST
Sony on track to double PSP sales
PlayStation Portable wins over movie fans, fortifying a solid debut though not the runaway success of the iPod.
The story "Sony on track to double PSP sales" published December 17, 2005 at 1:51 AM is no longer available on CNET News.
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11 comments
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After your DRM Root Kit Virus Program wasted hundreds of
thousands of computers,
the last thing anyone is going to do is give you money for a PSP,
PS2, PS3, or anything else.
Currently Sony is being sued by Texas, and many other states,
plus Italy and maybe more countries will sue in the future.
The XBOX 360 is Way Better than any Sony equipment!
available to the consumer worldwide people will simply go
elsewhere to satisfy their gaming needs. Besides the PSP is
simply one of, if not, the best product in the current market that
places a PS2 on steriods in your hands. Video playback, music,
photos, gaming, internet. Need I continue?
As far as the claim that the 360 is 'way better than any Sony
equipment' need I say how many more PS2's have been sold than
all the XBOX's combined? Need I also say how truly non-high
definition the 360 is compared to the PS3 reported stats? Need I
go on about the flawed deisng of the 360's power 'brick'
compared to Sony's general design of products. As a user of
Sony products for over 10 years I have no complaints. Know
why? Cos everything, and I do mean eveything, I have ever
brought from Sony still works!! Finally and above all else need I
say how functional and innovative Sony equipment is? This is the
company that gave the world the Walkman for pity's sake!!
OK the DRM root kit fiasco was a huge mistake that I'm sure the
state of Texas will make the company pay for dearly. My final
point is this. If you're gonna whinge about boycotting Sony and
how bad it is do it properly. Reading the previous comment
makes me wonder if you were one of the people whose
computers were 'wasted.' Make life easier for yourself. Use the
damn iTunes music store, get an iPod and quit complainin'
about what's wrong with the world when most of it works!!
A DRM MONITOR!!!
Don't think you can have credibility touting microsoft junk saying its somehow "pro-consumer and anti-drm". You are just acting like a DRM fanboy.
And i wonder will i be called some Sony puppet who cannot think by myself? Hey Sony if you are reading this, please give me a PS3 or maybe the entire DVD collection of Spiderman movies as payment for being a puppet thank you.
I want to like the PSP and I want to like the PS3. But I just **can't** as long as they are playing these homosexual DRM games over at Sony Music.
First in the late 70's they stole Andreas Pavel's idea for the walkman player and lodged false legal countersuits to dissuade and rid themselves of the inventor, to deliberately avoid payment of all royalties!
Later, the game controller key layout design in use on PS2 and PSP belong to someone else, and they deliberately decided to avoid royalty payments! The owner of that idea,has won that particular case only recently by litigation!
Next , for well in excess of ten months, corrupt audio cd's ,with sales in excess of 20 million sold at retail level, from SONY BMG music on various labels, has severely compromised security in both private and government computers using Windows OS! Legal action, in respect to that fiasco, is now pending from both government and private class action!
Now ,a fair percentage of retail products sold by SONY, are in fact rebadged/rebranded products from other manufacturers, with higher retail prices, than it's equivalent competitors !
I am, sure many people can add on to this list, about SONY's continuing tales of woes, and misadventures/theft and piracy of interllectual property!
Any information supplied by SONY, should be treated as suspect, until proven by other more reliable sources!
Oh well, if SONY, was such a flush well managed corporation, as some people seem to think, then why did it sell it's company pension fund to the Japanese Government in 2004, to balance it's corporate books?
Question is thus, why indeed buy any product from SONY!
In fact, no one actually BUYS a PSP just for the prospect of playing MP3s or movies. Whoop-de-friggin-do. Since it uses an external memory source, the FIRST thing that hackers did was learn to make homebrew apps to play all kinds of different audio and video codecs and filetypes.
Beyond that, most people just use the thing to play SNES, Neo Geo, Gameboy Advance, and other ROMS. All of it illegally, all of it on emulators coded by hackers who didn't have the same kind of tools or support as actual game developers.
I mean, the PSP will NEVER be another iPod. Why? iPods can hold up to 40GB of stuff (movies, pictures, music) whereas PSP users are limited to expensive and short-ranged (usually 1GB) memory sticks and memory stick duos.
If the Sony marketing team (here in America) was SMART and actually IN TOUCH with the people that they call their core demographic, they'd embrace the hackers that are making the PSP even remotely worthwhile.
Seriously, the PSP is absolutely worthless as anything more than a social status accessory. If you want music and video, you could very easily go with an iPod. If you wanted games, you could get a Nintendo DS, which will not only play all the new DS games, but also a backlibrary of Gameboy, gameboy color, and gameboy advance games that numbers in the tens of thousands. Both of these are cheaper, and easier to use for these purposes.
By itself, without hacks, the PSP's only redeeming quality is it's screen. It's very nice, ultra-crisp, and not all that prone to dead pixels.
Everyone that I know who has a PSP : young, blue-collar, (at least partially) college educated, inner-city, and with JUST enough money to burn on video games and going out each week, has bought a PSP with the sole intent of using it for the mostly illegal purposes I described above.
Really, the PSP doesn't get too much enjoyment from those who aren't computer literate. Most people aren't willing to pay $22 for a UMD movie they'll only see once, and there are only 4 or 5 games out there on the PSP that most people would even consider buying. Multiplayer is pretty much a NO, and network connectivity is non-existant to most people.
For most people, buying a PSP to watch movies, play MP3s, and play ROMs (illegally for the most part) is cheaper and more portable than buying a laptop.
It's too sad that Sony marketers can't face the truth. They blame high prices for the PSP's low sales.... $1,500 eBay pricetags hasn't stopped the XBOX 360, has it? People don't have any problem laying down between $100 and $400 for iPods, which won't even play video games.
Maybe they should blame the lack of interesting games, or the fact that the system is tied down to the cumbersome and ridiculously proprietary UMD and Memory Stick formats.
Oh, and targeting the "urban youth?" That's quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard. No urban youth will spend that much for something with such limited use when they could buy a full-fledged MP3/video player for much less with MUCH more memory capacity.
Maybe Sony should support the people who are ACTUALLY buying the damn things : college kids who are making custom skin designs for their cases and PSPs, hackers who are modifying it to do the things that people truly want it to do, and the nerds who are fully enjoying all the benefits of being able to play the original arcade version of "Salamander 2" incognito while their electrical engineering professor blabs on about flip-flops and timing diagrams.