So, what's the toss between these two handheld beasties?
The first dagger in the UMD slot of the PSP has to be price. You can pick up a fantastic number of iPhone games for free, 59p to £1.99 - mostly simple fare, but enough to fuel your gaming for years to come. Even the more expensive titles are rapidly adding that polish and gloss that makes them worth the extra few quid, as long as don't want too many polygons on screen. PSP minis look overpriced in comparison, the range is laughable and while PSP has full-priced games, that's not doing so great on the sales charts outside of Japan. Sure, Sony has demos, but try getting them. Sony should drop PSP regionality NOW and have a global store for games, movies and comics; an instant one-up on Apple!
Then again, the PSP still has by far the superior games collection. Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo (bastardized though it may be), Metal Gear, God of War, decent EA Sports staples and so on. True, the BIG current-gen ports down have largely gone badly (Gran Turismo [again], Assassin's Creed, MotoStorm) but there are a lot of big names that gamers will pick up. The iPhone attempts at any of these (GTA Chinatown Wars [review coming soon] doesn't count), prove that Apple's device may be a super-phone but it is still just a phone.
Also in the PSP's favour is the control input, people moan about the lack of dual sticks on PSP. But at least it has one, plus all those lovely buttons, a significant advantage over the iPhone's soft buttons that reduce many games to poor shadows of what they could be.
Style is a pretty ephemeral issue, I prefer the PSP for watching video due to screen size. But the iPhone is sleek and lovely in the hand. Perhaps, when the PSP Go eventually comes down to sub-£100 I'll get one and cuddle that too, but really my original fat PSP is showing its middle age spread.
Fixing the PSP (again)
What should Sony be learning from the iPhone? First up, speed of interface - iPhone always connects to the home hotspot while the PSP has to jump through connection hoops, even if you're swapping between browser, store, RSS or other link. While I don't like iPhone's lack of folders, or even just an icon to keep games behind, its still faster than the PSPs media and games menus.
- Revamp the network connection to always on (with an option for Off for the panicky user)
- Tidy up the net options, have instant links to Facebook and so on
- Connectivity, the PSP has a network connection, make it do more - even the Wii does news and weather
Second, update the browser. While the iPhone won't play Flash, at least it can do everything else. The PSP browser feels like Netscape Browser V3 in comparison and hasn't been updated in, well forever. Not only does this show a lack of care and interest from Sony, it makes the package look bad.
- More browser memory
- Assign zoom functions to the nub for smooth scaling in and out
- Another tab or two
- Better support for social sites
- YouTube
Still, there's Age of Zombies and ModNation to come, I'm sure that'll fix everything. Whatever these stories are, PSP and DS aren't going to go away or wilt in the glare of the iPhone, but they should react in a positive way to the challenge, and not with stupid press releases like this.
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