the-inbetween.com

PSP Cons

The PSP is now in my possession and it is currently sitting peacefully beside the DS. There is harmony everywhere except in my wallet. It is a good machine. Everyone -- and I mean (Gary Oldman style) everrrrryyyyyonnee -- that has one is raving about it. I would probably do the same, but I am a technosexual whore, so every new toy is likely to do that to me.

So, since everyone is gushing and all the positives have already been mention a trillion times over, I'm going to solely focus on the negatives of the PSP.

• The price. It's too much. The $249 (300CAD) price-point was borderline reasonable, but the insistence on getting a bundle for $50 more pushed it over the edge. Fuck. In my day, we got games in our bundles without having to pay more and the included games didn't suck. Seriously. Gretzky hockey? Does Sony think that Canadians have an affinity for shitty hockey games? And the Spider-Man 2 movie? Bleh.
• This machine, as nice as it looks, is a complete smudge and finger-print magnet. More so than the DS, which actively encourages you to touch it! This shouldn't be, but I guess the initial two days of gloss and shininess are more important to the Sony Style than the layers of grease covering the device come June.
• So I'm paying $50 for extra crap and I get: a soft-case, a 32MB Memory Stick, headphones, a remote, a strap, a sampler disc, a crappy game, a crappy movie, and no USB Cable.
• The hype machine claims PS2 quality graphics. Don't believe that. That same hype machine said, before its launch, that the PS2 will be capable of creating a real-time Toy Story. Granted, the graphics are still pretty damned amazing for such a small machine, and they're far better than those found on the PS1 or N64 (or, naturally, DS), but they lag behind the PS2. Think of it as PS 1.5 graphics. But, really, this is a fault of the marketting and not the actual machine.
• I have no comments on the video, photo, and music modes because it did not include a USB Cable. Arg.
• It's cool that there's an analog... knob on the device, but it feels weird.
• Wireless is good. Typing in a 26-digit hex WEP key using its built in keypad tool is bad.
• White headphones... for an all black device. I understand that you want some of the iPod marketshare, Sony, but this is the wrong way to go about it. It looks stupid, and if you are walking around the city with the PSP's headphones on other people are not going to think that you have a PSP -- they'll think you have an iPod. See, Apple used the white headphones in its branding. That brand is what was cool; not the headphones, and certainly not your (even lousier than the iPod's) headphones.

That's all I can think of, and since a lot of those are minor complaints, everything else is looking rosy. Now it's up to the content producers to do something really cool with the device.