Dear Sony:

It’s been a few months since I wrote you my first letter, and since it’s been a while since we talked I thought I’d send you an update to tell you how my (un)favorite handheld has been treating me.

I vented about the unfriendly interface and functionality around video playback, and I appreciate the strides in fixing them through the recent firmware updates. Sure they were short strides, and rather late fixes, but fixes nonetheless. I can now take my favorite iPod-formatted AVC podcast and drag and drop to the video folder. Your months of focus groups and R&D in the lab have paid off, and I thank you for coming up with such an innovative, yet still user-friendly, experience. I also recommend you trademark the “drag-and-drop” phrase before anyone else catches on.

Remember my threat of buying a Creative Zen video player? Well it didn’t turn out to be so idle after all. After my old MP3 player took a swim, my replacement plan helped me bury my sorrows in a shiny new Zen Vision:M. It’s so cute, and after seeing it wag its tail at me through the front window I knew I had to bring the little black player-that-could home. It doesn’t like AVC or H.264 files so much (it turns its poop runny), but it does just fine on a diet of DivX, Xvid and WMV files. “Bark!”

And now that Microsoft has updated the Xbox 360 to play WMV files, I have switched over to the WMV feeds of my favorite video podcasts (and in the process left the Land of iTunes – damn you Apple, but I’ll save that for another rant) and can now watch stuff like Diggnation and the 1UP Show on something larger than my 1.5″ LCD screen. You know, the way it should have always been.

My PSP doesn’t get any video playback duties anymore, which is weird because I can now allocate all that time I used to spend converting and recoding video to…playing games? And oddly enough, there are a handful of games out for the PSP I actually want to play, like Gunpei and Lumines II, and the random JRPG. The PSP website is pushing out new demos and videos on a fairly regular basis. Although Sony needs to get the message out better regarding new content, and the content that is made available would be better if it were more standard across the globe, it is a nice treat to be able to download a Loco Roco Halloween demo. It’s kind of like getting that DumDum from the doctor’s office after getting a shot in the butt – the process isn’t very pleasant, but it’s nice to get some candy at the end of it all. On top of everything, I put a nice Hori anti-glare screen film on my PSP. See, I have been treating it well. I just argue about the reverse.

Not all is roses though. What gives about charging me an extra $10 to upgrade my PSP Media Manager software? This is after a $20 initial investment for something that should have been given to me for free? And on top of it, the latest version only costs $16 for new users? Thanks, Sony. I guess you have to make up all of those losses somewhere. I’m just not happy it’s from my empty pockets.

You might have seen my post about partnering with, no – begging to Sega to get their back catalog of console classics on the PSP. Having proven I have been right about these things before, you might want to look into it. It would make me, and about 20 million others, a little less disappointed about not buying a DS instead.

Thanks and Good Luck with PSP 2.0,

Spot