The PlayStation Portable was born a thing of entertainment convergence, a portable gaming device that would let people play games, watch movies, listen to music and surf the net.

But somewhere on the way from announcement to the hands of gamers, the PSP dropped the multimedia ball.

Now, a year and a half and 4.6 million in sales since the PSP’s launch, Sony is striving to revive the non-gaming functions of its svelte player, heeding the cry of PSP owners who say they want more from their portable.

Sony has renewed its push to make music and movies available on its system while adding new elements for the PSP such as an add-on Global Positioning System and camera.

They’re battling not just to swipe some thunder from Apple’s iPod phenomena, but also to stay a step ahead of Microsoft’s Zune — an upcoming portable device that will offer music, video and possibly gaming in a handheld device.

More importantly, Sony hopes to reconnect with customers who want their portables to do it all.

“The PSP consumer has turned out to be a different consumer in many ways than what we have targeted,” said John Koller, senior marketing manager for the PSP.

I can define it very simply.

Mediocre.

It’s a mediocre gaming system, and a mediocre multimedia device with mediocre battery life which is why the DS is just destroying it at the cash register.

Rocky Mountain News via Slashdot

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 8:07 am and is filed under Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.