PSP phone stinks of desperation

I LIKE the PSP. My son has one and when he's not looking I steal it and take it on business trips. It's OK for watching movies, good for playing certain games, listening to MP3s and the all the rest.

It's a decent portable entertainment device, no more, no less. However, it could be improved in numerous areas, like better battery life, cheaper games and the inclusion of internal storage.

And let's not forget the UMD movie format which currently stands - like HDMI cables - as one of the leading examples of "price gouging". After all, here you have a movie on a tiny disc that costs the same as the DVD version but which can only be played in a PSP? Now, that's value for money. No wonder UMD sales are plummeting.

It's not unfair to say that Sony - what with battery problems, the launch of the PS3 and other trifling concerns - has taken its eye off the ball on the handheld front. It doesn't help of course that the Nintendo DS is kicking its butt in sales terms all over the globe. So, what Sony needs - is desperate for - is something fresh, something that's going to help boost lacklustre sales and give people a reason to shell out for an expensive portable entertainment system.

Yesterday, it announced plans with BT to transform the PSP into a phone, or at least a VoIP-enabled device, for making voice and video calls over the Net using Wi-Fi. At first, only PSP-to-PSP calls will be supported but this will be ‘quickly' followed by the ability to support calls and messages between PSPs, computers, regular phones and mobiles. New PSPs later this year will come pre-loaded with the software necessary to get this up and running, at least in the UK, where the new services will be available first. Wow, a Sony product/service landing the UK first is almost reason enough to celebrate. Or maybe they expect it to bomb so badly that they should try it out here in the boonies before taking home to Japan.

The services will later be rolled out to around 100 other countries. As dramatic moves go, this is a certainly an Oscar-contender since there have been rumours that Sony would ‘comms-up' the PSP at some stage. We recently had the launch of the Go!Cam, clip-on Web cam for the PSP. With this new move, Go!Cam users might actually be able to do something useful with whatever they capture.

On the surface, this is good news for the 24 million PSP users out there - 8 million of which are in Europe. Well, not quite, because there's no plans to roll this out to the 7.4 million US users, so there goes 30 per cent of the entire PSP base. The PSP Phone, or PSPhone for want a cooler way to describe it, is a nice idea but it's really little more than an old idea being brought to market too late. The now displaced Ken Kutaragi, mooted the PSP phone in early 2005 and also said that the UMD movie format would be made open to everyone so that they too could make UMD players. Well, we all saw what happened to Ken.

The problems for me are numerous. The PSP is too big to be a phone of any description. Short of clamping it to the side of your head, you couldn't look more stupid than if you strapped on a brick. Even if there's a Bluetooth solution to accepting calls, the PSP is a bad choice for a comms device. There's no touch-screen which I‘d imagine will hamper the functionality, especially of messaging. And then we have that sucky battery life which will disappear faster than Britney's good looks once video calling kicks in. There's also no news on what this extra functionality is going to cost in terms of the software or the cost of the Wi-Fi. After all, neither BT nor Sony, are known for the altruism.

I have also seen reports yesterday from certain mainstream hacks that think this will compete with the iPhone. Those idiots should go back to covering traffic. The iPhone will appeal to mainstream phone users and iPod fanboys, which means it will sell boat loads on the basis of fashion, regardless of the cost. The PSP Phone, however, is an converged IP/gaming/entertainment mish mash that will sell to fans of the floptacular Ngage or the now defunct Gizmondo.

As a PSP owner, I'll take whatever new functionality I can get but I'd be happier if Sony sorted out the existing issues and improved on its good points, rather than trying to make the PSP into something truly mediocre. µ