Sony is coming out with a new version of the PSP called the PSP GO! Unfortunately, unless there are some changes to the current design, it looks like the whole system may be an excuse to turn the PSP into an iPhone and make the games like the Apple Apps relatively cheap and downloadable.
The new PSP Iphone?
In other words, Sony isn’t really offering anything in the way of major game playing improvements, and with the dropping of the UDMA drive, the PSP Go! looks a little like a disabled iPhone substitute for gamers . Cheap, small, elegant, and potentially limited in usefulness, the PSP Go! Looks like an attempt to get more money out of gamers.
Perhaps Sony thought the iPhone represented a brand new form of computing rather than seeing the iPhone as a temporary marketing trend which may be replaced by any number of open source Google Android enabled portable phones. Looking at all the glossy magazine ads touting the latest "apps" it seems apparent the Apple wants to believe they can charge people for what are essentially glorified shortcuts or proprietary alternatives to services easily found for free on the web. This may work in the short term, when Apple has all their customers in AT&T contracts, but soon – perhaps by the end of the year – alternatives will be available.
Perhaps the whole thing will go the way of Sony’s ill-fated iTunes-like music subscription service, and millions of customers will be left holding hard-to-use pieces of hardware without software support. It seems all the talk about Sony finally “getting it” when it comes to the Internet is not entirely accurate.
What gets people to buy the next great thing is either innovative game play like the Nintendo Wii, or lower price points like the Gameboy.
Sony PSP Go! will have a hefty price tag
Sony’s Go! promises may be a little pricey, especially compared to the iPhone, which gets subsidized by the sales of phone contracts. And when it does come out later this year, it will have to compete with all the new Android gadgets so it will have a lot of proving to do. So what in the end will Sony have achieved? They’ll possibly end up getting out of the portable gaming market all together. They are certainly distancing themselves from their current PSP customer based by shedding the internal UDMA drive and with it the ability for any GO! purchaser to play the games they already own.
This may all end up for the better, because once Sony gets its hand out of the software distribution market it may be able to once again refocus on hardware and come out with some elegant and pricey Vaio type Android-compatible products.
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