Microsoft has taken a swipe at Sony's PSP, giving the platform a dressing down for having plenty of the right tools, but using none of them well.
"The PSP is a reasonably successful product at the profit-and-loss level. But as a product concept, there are cautionary tales to learn from it," stated MS' hardware chief, Robbie Bach.
"While it is good at producing audio, it's not a good music player because it doesn't have local storage (except for flash memory slots). You can't keep your music there. It has a beautiful screen, but you can only get the video under the Universal Media Disc format. That format hasn't been successful. On a game level, it has done well. But even there, it is mostly PlayStation 2 ports. There isn't much original content. When you do these devices, they can't be pretty good at a lot of things. They need to be great at what they do."
You can't say Bach didn't skimp on the brutality there. A fairly dire assessment of the PSP, but he's not saying anything wrong about the system, unfortunately (and this is coming from a PSP fan). The PSP tried to be a jack of all trades and mastered nothing, when most people would have liked to just have a quality game player. Sony's plans for a "walkman for the 21st century" came unstuck when the PSP failed to excel at any of its services. Oh well, I still like the little bugger.
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Contest:
5:22 AM on 06.13.2008
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He also missed out the potential of homebrew - sony put the capabilities there, and have done nothing but stop others using it. Imagine an xbla or wii ware type thing. Could have been great... instead we all get custom firmware and do whatever we want.
Having said all that though... its still nice to have a half decent music player that can also play games and videos if i get bored.
Those are pretty fair complaints, though I still want a PSP, and for PS1 ports actually.
Who cares what Microsoft thinks.
at least it affords the opportunity to make the ultimate satirical fanboy/games media comment:
This just proves that Robbie Bach is obviously biased in favor of Microsoft.
I think that MS should put it's own handheld out if it wants to gripe... and I will prolly get it
Media may not be sold on anything but the UMD, but Sony's always sold a small media converter program (and there are freeware ones as well) to format any other video you may have to something playable on the system. There's also that nifty feature where you stream video off your PS3 or TiVO to it. One of the forthcoming Blu-ray features will allow you to download a PSP version of a Blu-ray movie from a PS3, and the UMD format has been re-launched at a better price point. Just last week GameStop had a big sale on UMDs with many titles available for $5. MTV has recently released AeonFlux and Jackass for $10.
In addition to countering those criticisms, I've been surprised by how much I use the wireless connection on mine, even just to stream music off my PS3 in the next room, sometimes to check email from in bed.
Japan seems to like Monster Hunter, that is
Jack off all trades, master of none indeed.
Touche~
Mouth closed until you clean your own mess.
Dude, download the latest PSP Video 9 from red kawa.
Choose the "new" video format option and the rest is a no brainer. Convert away!
Although you may have issues if the original content is not 100% intact. JSYK
Jack off all trades, master of none indeed.[/i]
yeah i had a similar experience...
I really like the PSP-idea, but it was done in a bad bad way...
What?
You CAN keep your music on the mem card and you can copy movies you "own" and convert them to play off your PSP mem card. 8 gig card FTW.
www.pspvideo9.com use it
MS fails
As for the Zune, I think its a great bit of kit, unfortunately MS are trying to foist another middleware app like iTunes between Windows Explorer and the device. If it detected as a removable drive and I could add files through windows explorer, I would buy one.
Bashing an MP3 player to get back at someone who's merely stating that something isn't perfect.
I want a PSP, despite the beef that I have with sony over their decision to use an entirely different proprietary format over one that was established and would've been a better decision overall. Yeah, I'm about to rant about the Minidisc format. Quick-as-hell seek and read times, coupled with phenomenal battery efficiency (I could get a single AA battery to play 25 hours from a hi-MD on random), and the potential for moar capacity (I think I heard somewhere to up to 4 gigs on a hi-MD disc could be achieved?) would have taken care of a good Bajillion percent of the Gripes many people have about the PSP today. Music? Bam. right on a rewritable disc. Movies? Bam. Disc. Pirating games? Not so much seeing as how you could've easily made write-protected MDs that couldn't be written over. Yes Sonicstage was a bitch to work with, but it was still better than itunes. If the PSP would've used the established MD format, not only would you have the Audiophiles that stood by their beloved ATRAC format flocking to get one so they could dust off their Minidisc collection, but it would've been cheaper to produce, and therefore even cheaper to buy. God damn, I'm a lonely, lonely man being up at this late ranting about this...
It's my at home handheld.
Also, possibly this is Bach's comments leading up to microsoft announcing their own handheld, pointing out that they know what sony did wrong, and maybe improving on it.