Sony has no clue about the PSP…

Sony is in big trouble with the PSP. They can’t figure out how to market it. First it’s a gaming machine. Then it’s a multimedia machine. Now, it’s something of both.
The truth of it is that the PSP is a remarkable machine. It could be so much more. But, one of the problems is that Sony’s advertising is misleading, in my opinion.
Take a look at their new “find me” commercial:  Find Me PSP
The girl in the commercial drops off a memory stick with the message “find me” to a guy sleeping (we can only assume it’s his bedroom – which is interesting because the situation implies he’s already “found her” and spent the night with her – but I digress).
Anyway, the guy looks at the various things on her memory stick for clues to her whereabouts. We see a video of her singing and a photo of her in a shirt with a unique logo that he finds on a poster.
Sure, its nice that you can put pictures and video on the PSP. What they don’t tell you is that you can’t do that very easily. You can if you cough up another $25 for Sony’s media manager. Or you can dig around for one of the freeware apps.
But, what would make the PSP a really cool machine is if the girl in question could have done all of this on the PSP natively. Oh yeah yeah, they have that nasty god awful brick of a camera that’s supposed to come out at some point (and costs more $$$).
Pics of PSP camera / GPS unit
So, why not just go ahead and make a PSP2 or PSP redux and integrate the camera in it? You would think it wouldn’t be that hard since every cell phone now has some type of camera in it, if not something with 2-3 megapixels.
While you’re at it, let’s rethink the GPS thing as well. I don’t care if it’s integrated, but I would like it to be a separate attachment that looks like it’s part of the overall design, not a big clunky block sticking out on top of the PSP.
And, go ahead and open up the source. The modders are coming up with really cool things for the PSP, so why stop them? How hard is it to make good music player UI?
It’s really sad because the PSP is one really cool little machine. It’s unfortunate that Sony can’t make up their mind about what they want it to be or invest the resources in making it a much better machine.