PSP Experience

Recently purchased a PSP. First impressions - Wow.

I bought it for a number of reasons, partly impulse, partly for gaming, but in a large part to the immense lifestyle potential for the device.

If the developers and community hit a few keys features it will elevate the PSP from a game play device with some basic multi-media features to an essential tool for improving, extending your lifestyle.

Many things they are doing on cell phones, which is getting harder and harder do to their small size to do effectively is multimedia capabilities like pictures, video and music, but the devices are so small that most of these features are unsatisfying.

Enter the PSP, which has a gorgeous large screen, excellent video playback, clear crisp picture display and clear mp3 playing.

Ahh, but the potential. I an excited, by the sheer possibilities that are inherent in the platform. I am sure that software will be available soon that will extend the media capabilities beyond pictures, music and video.

The true beauty of the device will be the introduction of media viewers that will allow users to surf the net, read e-books, view .PDF documents, read comic books and graphic novels (CDisplay), and many other things I can't even envision.

But the ability to view graphic rich documents on a portable device (hopefully with a slick one click transfer interface and super simple navigation) will extend its usability to new heights. Portable reference device, portable ebook reader, portable spread sheet viewer....any type of data should be easily viewable by content viewer interfaces either added to the device bios, or via "game" UMD document readers looking at data on the Duo Pro card.

Imagine a powerful, graphical ebook reader app, playing mp3's in the background and the hyperlinks in the ebook, taking the user, via a local WI-FI access point to a website with more information...the promise of the ultra portables PC on a device priced for everyone.

Beyond that I am sure that someone will produce a powerful, PDA "game" like UMD that will provide most or all the functionality currently offered on the Palm and PocketPC platform...

For graphics, a paint, picture editing program on UMD editing your pictures stored on the memory card.

My personal 1st favorite for porting to the Sony PSP is a version of Cdisplay, the popular comic viewing application, partnered with a program that will preprocess the picture files in their compressed form, optimize them for the Sony PSP and then reprocess them. Then simply move to the PSP memory card, load the Sony PSP version of Cdisplay and all your collections are available to view. (If Marvel/DC were tech savvy they would subsidize this and produce low cost comics for download and viewing on Sony PSP.) I currently use Cdisply to view old notebooks, that I have scanned viewable without having to carry around dozens of notebooks, as well as some favorite comics from my collection that I have scanned in. To this point they are not portable, but with some work and patience I am sure that a formal means of doing this will be forthcoming. (currently you have to resize and save, being careful of save time as that is how the Sony PSP organizes it)

http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay

The 2nd program, I would love to see ported to the PSP is the excellent e-book reader, Ubook. I use this program daily on my Axim PocketPC. I carry about 5 or 6 books with me at all times, as well as various reference documents, again an invaluable tool for viewing documents.

http://www.gowerpoint.com/

The third and most universal viewer I would like to see ported, is an Adobe Acrobat reader. The business applications of this are huge, as well as the ability to convert almost any document to a .pdf that would be viewable on the gorgeous Sony PSP screen.

Just some thoughts to get everyone dreaming for what it the Sony PSP will be capable of once everyone starts realizing the unique potential of this portable device.
The features that make it a superior gaming machine: robust processor; excellent screen; connectivity; varied storage options. Also make it something that potentially could be integrated into many more areas of the owner’s life, beyond games and basic media, to the information and documents that we interact with everyday.