PSP Updates - €199 PSP on March 22, official PSone emulator, PSP eyetoy

It’s an interesting step, and I suppose in some people’s eyes a good move forward, but you have to look objectively on all this.

[Good points]: the price drop is fine, step in the right direction
[/good points]

Bad points - an official emulator is nice, but there is already a psx emulator in the works (running around 5fps I believe, slow at the moment but room for development and by the time Sony release their official emulator I feel the homebrew one will really be on its way.) The other major problem is paying for the games cut price, what if you already have the cd of the game you wish to play for the original playstation, its a bit of a gyp having to pay to play it again! Taking the ISO from your game disc should, nay MUST be an option.

GPS: there has been a GPS hack for a long time now available for the psp. Imo, I cant see myself using this, anyone who wants multiplayer starts an ad hock game with their friends, uses xlink or finds a hotspot or uses the official wifi service, which they should focus on standardising and improving on.

Software booting from memory stick: please, I've been doing this for months, since I got my psp anyone who has had theirs from release has been able to load homebrew for well over a year! (Psp radio, various emulators, os shells, homebrew games and ISO loaders *yes they do have legitimate uses, reduced battery drain, faster loading times, not having to carry around multiple UMD's with you.) Is this really what you want so have?

Improved browser support and flash: there are several homebrew browsers available, and there has been a flash player developed.

*Keep in mind, it is nearly certain all these features will be included in the 3.00 FW upgrade, so you know you can kiss homebrew and downgrading goodbye for the near future (most likely forever as Sony will be sure to patch this one up better than they have in previous firmware’s.)*

Neutral points: I'm not sure if this new eye toy is a good thing or not, I cant see much of a benefit of this kind of device in a portable console. Fair enough if you are playing with the ps2 eye toy at 3am in the morning with your mates locked, but are you really gonna be using this thing on the bus?

All in all there is nothing there that really impresses me bar the price drop, what I would really like to see is the release of more games, checking our my local xtravision/woolworths there hasn’t been a notable new psp release in months (imo, this is all down to personal preference at the end of the day.) Perhaps the only worthwhile addition people were waiting for was the inclusion of decent size on-board flash memory, 4gig NAND flash was rumoured. This would be a useful addition to the device, as it would leave more room for mp3’s games and other multimedia content, possibly a large browser cache to help speed up WiFi browsing? This also does away with buying expensive proprietary mem stick duos.

There has been nothing mentioned about improving the psp's d-pad either, and from my own experience with the street fighter alpha 2 rom, the d-pad is atrocious for diagonal directions. How about including the official longer life battery in your packages now Sony? They’ve been in production long enough! Then you can unlock the true speed of the console, instead of capping it at 222mhz to "save on battery life."

It seems to me, that bar the additional prepharials, Sony is completely behind the times on this one, and the majority of things released has been a poor attempt by sony to combat homebrew development.

I will also just ad at the end here, im not a vicious nintendo fanboy, i am very fond of my psp, but when i was reading about the psp and drooling at the concept pictures i thought something so powerfull and attractive would never go into production. Thinking about the possibilities such a powerfull handheld could have, what has been delivered so far is a joke.

rant over.