Dear Sony:

I have been a faithful owner of your PSP since last May. Sure, I missed the initial launch, but the hype regarding WipEout Pure – one of my favorite franchises – forced me to trade in my trusty GBA SP, sell off my classic GBA titles and invest in your stylish, progressive handheld console.

It is obvious the PSP was designed to be innovative – a portable gaming device that rivals PS2-quality graphics, integrating WiFi technology with a proprietary disc format that can also play high definition movies on its widescreen display. In addition, the device can surf the web, and play music and movies right directly from a memory card, which opens the possibility of ripping my favorite movies and watching them on the go.

There’s only one problem – all of this works in concept, but none of it in execution.

I’m not ready to trade it in right away, because I depend on it as a multimedia device almost as much as a gaming device, but I’m giving serious thought to picking up a Nintendo DS. Don’t get me wrong, I love games like WipEout Pure, Lumines, X-Men Legends II and Metal Gear Acid 2. And as my primary home console is the Xbox/Xbox 360, it’s nice to have so many Japanese RPGs available on my handheld. If only playing games on it wasn’t such a chore. Not just because of the poor placement of the buttons, or the lack of a second analog stick, or even the lack of a single proper one. I don’t know how to put this any better, but load times suck. It’s a portable device that’s meant to play in short bursts, yet some games take longer to load than the time I have to play them. Also the PSP obviously wasn’t designed to be played without being plugged into the AC adapter, because the battery life sucks. Four hours? I had to buy another batter just to play games on a long flight. The fact that you had to dial back the CPU clock speed tells me you didn’t factor in the PSP actually being portable. This in turns effects loading times, graphical capabilities, etc., and makes it so that the original targeted performance is essentially unachieveable.

So one would think since gaming missed the mark, at least it would be a serviceable multimedia device? Yes, one would think, if it were easy to move multimedia files onto the device. MP3 audio isn’t as much of a problem, and it better not be since there are devices that cost 1/10th of a PSP that can do this flawlessly. It’s the video I’m talking about. Not only is it a pain to move video files on the PSP (and try to move both an AVC and MPEG file and see what I mean), but it’s a waste of my time and my CPU power to have to convert videos to move them over. I can go out and buy a Creative Zen video player, and it can play pretty much anything I throw at it, including DivX and Xvid. My PSP will only play AVC and MPEG videos, so pretty much any file I download I have to convert. And I’m talking about podcasts and legally downloaded files. Oh, what’s that Sony? There are podcasts that are already in PSP H.264 format? Ah, well maybe you can tell me how to create the required thumbnail and rename them to your uninterpretable naming convention? Not even your “easy-to-use” PSP Media Manager software will let me do this without reconverting the video, even though it’s already in the correct format.

And by the way, thanks for making affordable flash memory cards large enough to store content for those long trips. I had to buy two 1GB pro duos to get about as much content as an iPod mini, for about the same price. That’s just for the memory cards, mind you, not for the investment of the PSP itself. I’ll really appreciate it when you release the updated PSP model with the built-in 4GB hard drive. That means you finally realized your mistakes, albeit burning me and all other six million early adopters as a result.

So what did I learn from all of this? I should have bought a DS and held on to my GBA SP. Thanks Sony, I’ll be sure to think twice when buying the PS3 and rebuying all of my DVDs in BluRay.

Signed,

Used and Abused