PSP

I have a new gadgety love in my life – a Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). This just has to be the ultimate media centre device: movies, music, photos, web browsing and games, it does the lot. Hey, it even will run your business applications via AppSwing.:


I also just looove the rss feeds, although they are more a way of listening to podcasts than reading RSS text feeds. Nevertheless it is still great and seems to be rock solid.
As well as the unit itself I also purchased a 2gb memory stick and, after some playing around, have found I can get six or seven movies on it along with a load of MP3 tracks too. Getting the videos onto the device was helped by a freeware tool called PSP Video 9 which will convert a number of different media formats into something suitable for a PSP. The quality is good and the choice of movies is much better than that on a typical flight.

More information on getting video content onto your PS can be found  here and here.
Downsides? Well the desire of Sony to region encode just about anything that moves is a biggie. Not only are movies encoded but also (some) games. This also shows up the real inequity of it all. I have a US PSP (region 1) and my son has a UK PSP (region 2). I seem to be able to play all region 2 movies and games but my son cannot play any of my region 1 discs. A cynic might say that this is because region 2 discs are more expensive than their region 1 equivalents and so no one from region 1 in their right mind is going to want to buy a region 2 disc when they can get it cheaper at home. Actually, this is the exactly the reason I bought a region 1 machine – so that I could import games and movies from the US and still have them cost my significantly less than if I bought the same item here.

Oh and the other downside is that it is not the worlds smallest mp3 player!

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