How my PSP kicks ass.

I knew when I finally bought the PlayStation Portable that it was a great handheld gaming system, but that wasn't why I had bought it. Face it, there are a few great games for it, but most of them are mediocre. I didn't buy it solely to play games. Here are the most useful functions of the PSP, as far as I'm concerned:

Catching up on my TV programs.
A 4-gig MS can store almost a full day's worth of TV shows. I record all my shows using GB-PVR (free) on my home computer, then transcode them (substituting a version of ffmpeg that I grabbed from pspvideo9) into a video format that's compatible with the PSP. Each morning I copy a few episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report onto my memory stick to watch later that afternoon. I usually watch news shows, documentaries and other programs that doesn't require me to actually watch the screen full time, since I usually work while I watch. Subtitled anime for example, would be really bad for my "productivity".

Listening to music.
I load up my memory stick with some MP3's from my home collection for listening at work or in the car. The PSP doesn't really support playlists, so I have to organize my music into various folders. For example I have a folder with slower tunes for chilling out at work, and another folder with more upbeat songs for when I'm driving. I have to say though, using the PSP buttons for controlling your music really sucks. Why didn't they use the analog joypad for scrubbing forward/backward through each song?

Downloading audio podcasts.
Probably my favorite feature of the PSP, the one that puts it far above the iPod. If you use an iPod, you've got to use iTunes to download your podcasts onto your computer, then finally sync it to your iPod. With my PSP, if I want to listen to last week's broadcast of This American Life, I just go find myself a hotspot, and use the RSS browser to stream the audio over the net, or save a copy of it onto my memory stick. I wish I could do this with video podcasts too, but the PSP can't readily play video content meant for the iPod.

Surf the web. Kind of.
The connection speed is pretty slow so you have to wait a while for pages to load, and when it finally comes up more often than not the layout won't look quite right. Something screwy with the page rendering algorithm that the PSP uses. I limit myself to checking the front pages of news sites like the BBC or Google News, doing simple tasks like checking in for my flight, and checking my email. That's checking, not writing email. Writing a novel on your mobile phone would be a walk in the park compared to composing a sentence using the PSP's input system. Lastly, I also use my browser to read my RSS feeds using the mobile version of Google Reader.

Annoy my friends with my vacation photos.
"Hey, how was your trip?" They'd ask, to which I would reply while firing up my PSP slideshow, "It was great! Here, I got a few hundred photos for you to look at!"

Read a book.
There's a pretty good text/pdf reader called Bookr, that I've used a few times to read some books like Grimm's Fairy Tales that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. The display is crisp and very sharp, and you can choose to read the text using the default landscape orientation, or rotate it 90 degrees the way I like it.

Play games.
Oh yeah, I use the PSP to play games, too! I installed the open edition firmware version 3.40 OE-A, which allows me to use several homebrew emulators on my PSP. gpSP lets me play GameBoy Advance games like Super Mario World. Firmware 3.40 OE-A also includes classic PlayStation 1 emulation, so now I could also relive the days when I was playing Gran Turismo 2. There's also Daedalus, which emulates the Nintendo 64 on the PSP. As far as the native PSP games go, of the few games that I have bought, the only UMD that sits in the drive bay of my PSP these days is still Lumines.

Now. Cool gizmo that it is, there are a few things that would make the PSP better still:

• A decent input system. Come on, I can type my emails into a mobile phone faster than using this.
• Scrub through a song using the joypad. It's no click wheel, but it's the best control device we have on the PSP.
• Support iPod video content. Pretty much all the video podcasts out there are made for the iPod. Nobody's making content just for the PSP. Not even Sony. So don't make us jump through multiple hoops to transcode our videos for the PSP.
• Better podcast fetching. Right now I'm able to fetch a given number of episodes (up to 5) for each RSS channel that I select, and it always overwrites what I have already downloaded. For example, if today is August 14th, and I grab the 3 latest episodes of a daily news podcast, I would get the shows from the 14th, 13th, and the 12th. Tomorrow, when my automatic fetch fires up again, it would grab the shows from the 15th, PLUS the 14th and 13th again. Inefficient use of time and bandwidth!

Ok, I better sign off so that I can finish watching last night's episode of Mad Men.