melbourne chapter

Yesterday was my birthday, so I decided to spoil myself a little and get myself a gadget. I have had my eye on the PlayStation Portables for a while and have liked the idea of travelling with it on a plane. My partner Zoe and myself are heading off to Hong Kong and Italy in a little over 7 weeks in October and this was a good enough reason for me to investigate deals and the capabilities of the PSP.

The PSP is made by Sony and was anticipated to be an Ipod killer. Although I don’t think it will “kill” the Ipod it certainly gives it a run for its money. The major advantage to the Ipod’s is their internal HDD, and generally their sleek design and image.

The PSP has several features to it that I really like, such as:

• WiFi and Internet Browser
• Large Display (4.3 inch screen, 16:9 ratio, 480 x 272 res, 16million colours)
• In-built Speakers
• Plays games as well as your MP3/MP4’s
• Accepts removable media, the UMD (Universal Media Disk) and Sony MemoryStick/Duo

The Deal
I researched prices across JB Hifi and EB Games. Typically I have found that JB Hifi have usually been quite good with their pricing (maybe average $5 off games you would find in EB) but don’t have nearly as much support. I would hate to try and return a game that has been opened to JB opposed to EB. EB Also have a good policy of price matching to ensure their sale.

Both shops were offering different incentives to purchase their product. You get the base PSP Value Pack with includes the unit, a soft cover case, a headphone remote (volume up down next track etc) as well as a 32MB Memory stick and an additional “freebie” offer. JB had a deal running that you got the PSP Value Pack and a game for $388 and EB had two deals running, $399 with 3 UMD movies or a 1GB Memory Stick. After dealing with the EB staff who assisted me, they would no match JB offer on the deal as it differed in its offer, but they would reduce a game by 25%.

In the end I chose to go with EB and get the 1GB memory stick package (because I wanted to be able to store some content when we travel) and I chose the game GTA – Liberty City Stories. All up I was at around $470 for the setup.

Experience
When I got home I remembered the fact that I would have to charge the removal lithium battery (3.6v 1800 mAh), I always hate having to do that. After having a quick flick through the manual for the PSP I found that there were no obvious (to me) notifications explaining that you had to let it charge completely before using. Eager to get on with playing it I plugged it into the wall and let it sit for a minute or two, and then switched the power on. The manual says that depending on your usage, the batteries should last between 3-6 hours.

The unit has quite a decent weight (.62lbs, whatever that is in grams) to it and feels quite sturdy. When I popped open the UMD ejector at the back of the unit it felt like a MD player, with light weight looking very easy to break, the kind of situation where you hate to reach across it to pick something up because if your clothing was to catch it you would probably rip it off. Once that it is closed though everything feels sturdy and safe again.

The PSP Value Pack comes with a demo disk containing (non-playable) game demos of several titles to PSP. It is a good opportunity to give the unit a little work out and see how motion looks on the screen. My first impressions of the screen were great – bright, very high refresh rate and very clear.

The buttons are the same as you would find on a Playstation controller, with your standard directional keys as well as the triangle/circle/square/cross. You also have a small thumb joystick that remains flush to the unit but as a grip that you press in any (2D) direction. You also have volume buttons, screen brightness controlls, select, start and home buttons and the left and right “bumpers” at the top corners of the unit.

Menus are very easy to use and you scroll through the different types of functionality, such as music, video, games and internet. The PSP uses a system for inputting text (keyboard) very similar to that you used on your old mobile phone. You are presented with a series of “abc” “def” options which you use the arrows to select and the other buttons to cycle. Initially I found this to be a little awkward, but after playing around and having a read of the manual (that helped) I found it quicker and easier.

WIFI
At my apartment we are running a Belkin wireless router supporting 802.11b+g with an Optus ADSL account. I have got my Xbox 360 connected to the router, as well as a laptop using the wireless. This has allowed me to have a good signal strength and use the laptop anywhere plug and play to the net.

I was very eager to get the PSP hooked up to the WIFI and went about it even before looking at the game I purchased. I quickly found the networking settings (funnily enough) in the settings from the main menu. The whole process was incredibly quick to setup and locate the WIFI networks broadcasting a session ID. Virtually as soon as you have hit new connection and given it a name the PSP will allow you to scan for signals. It supported all the basic security features of WIFI, such as WEP/WPA encryption and after trying to locate my 26 character connection key I was able to connect and test my connection to the network.

I took my PSP to show some of my friends last night at my birthday dinner at Tom Phat. I had a humerous time detecting networks as we were driving home and the amount of networks found with the “default” session Ids and no apparent WEP/WPA security. Using the PSP it was incredibly quick and responsive to scan the area for networks and give good overviews of signal strength and encryption details.

WIFI can run on infrastructure mode or AD-HOC allowing a decentralised network.

Browsing the Internet
The PSP comes with a few nice features for playing around with the Internet. It has a RSS multimedia feed reader allowing you to subscribe to streaming media channels, and a decent web-browser (from my initial impressions).

The internet browser was a little hard to figure out at the start. I was unsure of how to key in an address, use the back and forward features etc. I stumbled around with it at first, still not seeing an internet page. The thumb joystick is a cool feature and turns into a fast moving mouse pointer. After locating the Help screen (that provides a quickly digestable diagram of the buttons and their functionality) I was off trying to bring up google.

When entering an address, the PSP aids you by presenting you with extra options, such as previous input history and extra “scroallable” options, such as “http://www.” and “.com.au” options. Once that you realise the functionality is there, you should find it quite easy to text (although I wouldn’t be writing essays on it that is for sure).

Once I had keyed in the google address; “Woah” was my thoughts. Immediately I was seeing the all too familiar google home page waiting for me to prompt in a few search keywords. The screen looked very sharp and displayed as I would have expected.

I was eager to test out how the browser would cope with wide pages and DIV’s. I keyed in my name into the google search panel and had my website and blog (melbournechapter – what you are reading) display immediately. I selected the melbournechapter option to load the wider width (designed for 1024+ width devices). The window loaded and the layout was the same as it would be on a Firefox display (thankgod for compliance). Although the device was 16:9, it still couldn’t display 1000pixels across on a ~450pixel screen. Although this is my fault when designing the website template, most sites you come across won’t be anticipating much traffic with a PSP. This being the case the PSP has a very good scroll option and I wasn’t greatly phased by horizontal/vertical scrolling.

I checked out a few different sites such as amazon and sony and things looked good. You can bookmark your favourites to jump back quickly, and have all the standard back/forward/stop options you find in a desktop browser.

Gaming
Next I loaded up my UMD media for the game Grand Theft Auto – Liberty city stories. My friend had warned me that the PSP was rumoured to have longer than usual load times, but I didn’t find that to be a noticeable case.

The game had an initial load sequence that took maybe 10-15 seconds as it loaded content from the UMD disk. The game started into its cut screen sequences with short loads occurring during switching from story to story or from game mode to cut scene. The screen refresh and apparent frame-rate was great. The game was bright and easy to play (except I haven’t got particularly far in it yet, maybe the first 5-6 missions).

A nice feature I liked about the PSP was my ability to switch off the unit half way through driving a car, and leave for a minute or two, and switch it back on and then keep driving. I found if you leave it for an extended period it displays a loading screen that takes around 5 seconds to load back up to where you were in the game.

MP4 and Videos
I haven’t had an opportunity yet to purchase a UMD video, but I did download one from the PSP site. I connected the PSP using a USB cable of my camera, as the PSP Value Pack did not include this. The cable hooked up to Windows XP (Home) immediately identified the PSP and did not require drivers or a restart. It allowed me to access the Memory Stick as if it was a removeable device or card reader. The PSP website includes some Java Software that allows you to download directly to the PSP without needing any other applications (say to transfer a file from your computer to the device).

The PSP uses a proprietary MP4 format which annoyed me (thoroughly). You cannot simply drag and drop your MP4 avi’s across to the memory stick.

I found there is a good application to handle the conversion for you, which uses ffmpeg to handle transcoding a DivX or Xvid into a PSP format, and also allows you the opportunity to lower it quality/bitrate to lower memory usage. The application I found to transcode/covert MP4/DivX/XVid to PSP format for free is called PSP Video 9 – which you can download from their website http://www.pspvideo9.com/

Overall impressions
This PSP has got me excited about its capabilities, and unlike how I feel with the Xbox 360, there appears to be a huge range of games available and lots and lots of videos. I am a little annoyed that you can-not “burn” your own media onto UMD and that you have to convert your MP4’s for PSP.

The PSP screen is great, the WIFI features are great and I feel like I have purchased something worth the money I have spent.

Some Photos