The PSP PIM

A Sony PSP personal information manager?

I got my son a Nintendo DS at christmas and I was quite impressed by the hardware so started looking at how you might use it as a non-game platform. However, the difficulty of actually getting things on the closed platform was a deterrent. But today a sony psp came by way as a trade for some computer stuff.

The psp is quite an advanced piece of hardware in a small handheld device, it is unfortunately marketed as a game console when it could be so much more. My son was fascinated by the music/movie modes while i was interested in the wifi, rss, web browsing ebook and audio book potential. I want to move pdf and html files and mp3 audio books plus training videos to use it as portable learning tool.

The controls are a bit odd - i can't get used to X being enter - enter is a positive step and X has the connotation of canceling an action.

The first thing we did was update the firmware from 3.5 to 5.03 which in retrospect may have been a mistake. Apparently sony, with their usual thickhead approach uses updates to 'brick' third party applications. Gee, way to downgrade the value of the platform. Looks like a lot of people do not upgrade for this reason. Went off to a pawn shop and tested all the psp models they had but all were version 3 firmware or higher.

Another sony stupidity - the usb port uses a mini usb connector, which is fine right? - no problem as i have a box full of such cables. Except sony uses a custom connector unlike all the others . I was fortunate to actually have one sony cable left over from the purple vaio is used to have.

The first task was to configure it for the wireless network. I added the MAC address of the psp to the access list on the wireless access point and then set up an entry for the house network on the PSP. It found the WAP and picked up an IP address with pretty good signal strength.

Another annoyance - connecting to wifi is a 2 step process - you have to select network type (infrastructure) and then a stored connection. Why can't the saved setting select the network type? or assign a default to network types. Again the default is based on an intended audience of head to head gaming.

Update - actually once you create a defined connection you can just click on that and it selects infrastructure mode for you. So that is ok.

However, running the web browser was frustrating - typing http://www.google.ca was an exercise in stupidity. And the design of the application seemed clumsly - i really missed the nintendo ds touch screen at this point. I found a program online that will convert your bookmarks to psp format. Will try that later. Anyway, when we finally seemed to get the thing going it reported a network error and could not connect. It seems to have lost the wireless network connection. Will have to troubleshoot this.

I did some poking around and found that lots of people want to read pdf and other materials on a psp but that sony makes it hard to use the device you bought for the purpose you want. It does seem there are some apps out there so will try to get them installed and report back. Also need to get a pim apps too.

Update

Well, without being able to go back to system 1.5 there is no homebrew possibility. I did play with the included sony stuff and got the web browser to work. It's a little difficult entering http:// addresses but once in, you can bookmark them. I did find a couple of annoying things, first i ram out of memory and second i could not enter an http:// address that because with an IP number of 1 such as 192.168.1.1 so i could do some router maintenance or 192.168.1.100 so i could manage the switch or the print server for that matter. The browser worked good for a while and then the device lost the wireless and disconnected itself.

Anyway, i've added a pic of the web running on a psp. The unit is a bit too heavy because of the cd drive etc, for comfortable web browsing so i ordered an Apple ipod touch to try that out.

Update:

You can transfer MP4 movie files from linux and have them work. All you need is to create a .jpg file with the same name as the movie. To convert movies to mp4 format you can use PSVC from http://pspvc.sourceforge.net. Once downloaded you have to run the setup script.

The default INSTALL DIRECTORY is /usr/local and you have to run the script as root, probably best to open a terminal window and use:

sudo ./install /usr/local

i'll install this on the weekend and test out a movie conversion.

Why don't content producers (beside iTunes) make these things available? It is a pain to have to convert every damn cd and movie you buy to the format you want, what a waste of time.

An old salesman once told me his secret, 'Don't get in the way of the customer'. The way audio and video is sold makes piracy the easier option. You can't seem to buy the product you want. I went to HMV and Best Buy on the weekend to buy some SACD and DVD-A discs for the super high end 5.1 sound system and neither one seemed to stock them and the staff had no idea what i was talking about. No wonder cd sales are in the toilet. The only place you can find quality product is on torrents...which means rogers or bell gets all the money.