Not long ago, everyone was excited about Sony’s PSP. Why shouldn’t we have been? It’s by far the most technologically advanced handheld device that has ever been conceived. It plays games, music, and movies, and even surfs the Internet when connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot. It’s a very versatile handheld device, one that could have been the biggest thing since sliced bread. But like so many gadgets that have come before, the PSP is currently sitting idle in the closets of its once rabid fan base. The biggest question is why?

Peter Redmer, a gaming enthusiast from the Chicago suburbs, is one of many disappointed PSP owners. "I was so excited about the release of the PSP. I scraped together all the loose change I could find, and even traded in some of my older games to get one, but now its been sitting completely unused for the last 9 months. Now I want a DS Lite."

Wrong Design From the Beginning, UMD Flops

Sony's first major mistake happened even before the PSP hit the market. The PSP was designed to be more than just an evolution in portable gaming, but instead as a mobile entertainment center, thereby shifting the focus of the PSP from gaming to music, video, web surfing, and everthing else in between. Sony may think this "all-in-one" approach to the PSP was also ill-concieved, considering they've recently launched a product called Mylo, which is a handheld entertainment device that oddly overlaps many functions of the PSP. Moving forward, one could expect that Sony will more heavily focus on the PSP's gaming abilities.

Designing the PSP as a mobile entertainment device ultimately led to mistake number two, called UMD, their small proprietary optical disc format that serves as the storage medium for games and movies. In concept, it’s almost the perfect format for a mobile gaming device. Examine that last statement carefully, and you’ll see I said “gaming” device, not mobile media device. I’ve always believed that proprietary formats work for gaming devices. The games are already proprietary to the system in which they run on, so who cares about the storage medium? It’s all the other aspects of mobile entertainment that fall apart when proprietary formats are chosen.

Take movies for example. Sony managed to create quite a stir about selling commercial movies on UMD. They even managed to get the support of several Hollywood studios, creating a rather impressive catalogue of titles available for a proprietary device. In the brief heyday of UMD popularity, sales of movies on UMD were actually good… much to my surprise. I’d been predicting the demise of UMD movies since beginning. Don’t believe me? Check out this forum thread from 2005. For a short time, I thought I could be wrong. No one seemed to mind paying fifteen to twenty bucks for a lower quality version of a movie only playable on the PSP’s 4.3-inch display.

Sometimes I hate being right. It was recently announced that commercial sales of UMD movies slowed to a trickle, and not only is Hollywood basically ending support for PSP releases, but Sony is pulling the plug as well. You know there's no hope left when the captain abandons ship.

Apparently, no one wants to buy a movie on two separate formats for mobile and home playback. What a shocker…

Memory Stick to Save The Day?

Now that UMD has flopped, Sony is looking to capitalize on Memory Stick as a distributable format for commercial movies. Memory Stick, Sony’s third mistake, was merely Sony’s “me too” reaction to the flood of flash memory formats to hit the market a few years back, and would have ultimately gone the way of the Dodo if not pushed in their other electronic offerings. By the time the PSP was released, the SD format had already become the dominant removable memory format of choice for MP3 players, cell phones, and digital cameras, and was half the price of Memory Stick at any given size.

Sony recently announced the Memory Stick Entertainment Pack, which includes a 512MB, 1GB, or 2GB memory stick with a special installer disc that will extract video clips and movie trailers to the Memory Stick for PSP playback. Clips and trailers… yippee… The two largest versions also let you have one of four mediocre Sony movies in digital format. Giving away a free copy of “Hitch” with an overpriced Memory Stick is NOT a solution.

Actually, video playback from the Memory Stick has been one of the few consumer friendly ways to watch movies on the PSP, provided you can figure out how to do it. Savvy enough users have been able to convert their movies on DVD to a format playable on the PSP, making the PSP somewhat useful as a portable video player. Unfortunately, the process for doing so is time consuming and not user-friendly enough for the masses. If Sony really wanted to sell commercial movies for playback on the PSP via Memory Stick, why not create an online store where people can buy and download them in digital form?

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