I made the costly mistake of stopping by Best Buy today. I was just going to check out thier current selection of DAPs and grab a movie. But today was the first time they had any PSPs in stock. Gameboy DS, that's been around for awhile, never interested me. I'm not a gamer, mind you. Games are fun and all but I don't have the time. Anyway, I ask the nearest Best Buy guy to see a PSP, because there wasn't any demo-unit on the floor. I know its supposed strengths as a portable Playstation and its supposed weaknesses as a media player, but you never really know a device until its in your hands. So the guy runs and gets it, hands it over, and... oh yeah... it's cool. The gadget-geek in me was hit by the screen quality and slickness of the design/build. I was sold. Once it was in my hands, game over man. Bought the PSP and Ridge Racer for $ 250 and $ 40, plus tax.

I get home, tear it open, get it running. Ridge Racer is cool and all, but I drive like that in real life so it's pretty easy so far. What I'm most curious about is the other things it does - music, movies, pictures, and WiFi.

WiFi - ugh.. Somebody kill whoever decided to implement an onscreen input system that mimics a cellphone's numerical pad instead of a virtual keyboard. I tried to set up the PSP to work with my WEP-enabled wireless router but after mis-entering the key twice I gave up and just turned off the security. Works fine now of course. PSP said it needed to download some security patch. After that, there wasn't anything more to do... it doesn't come with an internet browser or anything.

Next I wanted to play some MP3s so I hooked it up to my computer and copied some over. The PSP is MSC so it appears as an external hard drive. Quick and painless, quite unlike Sony's usual tactics (SonicStage). However the PSP couldn't see the music I had loaded. I found out that audio files have to be located in a directory called MUSIC off the root of the memory card. Did that and it worked. No need to transcode, it plays high-bitrate MP3s without any fuss. Sounds good too. The now playing screen is kind of plain, but it works.

Next up: movies. I'm just now getting into the DVD/video conversion scene but it's still confusing - I'm dumb/old, whatever. The manual was no help but I found a how-to guide on Engadget that was really helpful. I transcoded a short video clip with GP3 and it played nicely on the PSP. You're limited to coding video at 320x240 while the screen is actually 480x272 but on the PSP you can zoom playback to full-screen mode. Looks good, really. $ 250 for a player with a 4.3-inch TFT LCD? Only from Sony. It's a loss-leader, sure, they expect you buy enough PSP-related crap to make up the difference and more from licensing fees.

The catch of course is that it only comes with a 32mb memory stick which doesn't hold much video. Not much at all - only a few minutes worth. So you need a higher capacity stick to make the PSP useful for video playback. A 512mb stick is enough for a 1 hour video while you need a 1gb stick for full length movies.Unfortunately, the Memory Stick Duo format is twice as expensive as Compact Flash. I looked around but the 1gb versions are sold out at most webshops and the ones that have them are charging full retail. I ended up buying a 1gb stick of Sandisk's "Ultra-II" (reads/writes faster than normal Duo) on eBay.

I did this because I have an idea that the PSP is going to work beautifully with the Cowon iAudio X5. The X5 is special because it has a USB Host function. That means I can connect the PSP and X5 directly together, and transfer files back and forth. I already tested this, it works as expected. While the PSP is always going to have limited storage capacity, the X5 has a 20gb hard drive - and it's also available in 30gb and 60gb models. A 1gb stick in the PSP will hold a full-length movie that's been properly compressed into MP4, but after you watch that, then what? With the X5, you can store several MP4 movies on its hard drive and change out the video that's stored on the PSP, wherever you are, without a PC.

The X5 can play movies too, but the 1.8-inch screen is about 1/6th the size of the PSP's. Better to use the X5 for music/file serving and the PSP for movies/games.

To be fair the whole X5/PSP synergy is not wholly confirmed yet, with such large files I mean. I don't have a 1gb Memory Stick to test with since I just ordered it. However I was able to confirm the X5's ability to read/write large files to/from other USB MSC devices like my digicam (Olympus D40). Succesfully transferred a 117mb zip file, so I'm assuming that 300-600mb video files should work as well. It's not super-fast, mind you... more like USB1 speeds. I'll test how much time it takes when I get the new stick.

Another thing I have to mention - notice the PSP and X5 have nearly identical designs. Black casing, top and bottom, both with a silver metallic band around their side-perimeters. It looks like they were made for each other.

UPDATE: Cleared some of the irrelevant crap out of this post, sorry, too many beers in me when I wrote it. I also left out anything about the PSP's picture-viewing feature, which is really nice. You just create a directory called PHOTO off the root of the memory card and dump all your JPEG pics in there, or into subdirectories. You can quickly page through images with the paddle-buttons, and the picture quality is fantastic. For showing off photos, I like the PSP much better than the Olympus MR-500 that we reviewed a few months ago.

Click "Read more..." for a few more pics.



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