Random PSP thoughts ...

I was thinking in the shower this morning (where I do all my best thinking), and had some thoughts about the PSP. There could be some directions that the PSP is going to, perhaps unintentionally, drive the market.

For example, the widescreen format of the PSP (and the mass-market appeal) has already changed my though process. I caught myself thinking that I'm going to create a droplet for Photoshop that will crop and resize my photos to PSP's screen dimensions. If I get a new videocamera, it's going to have to support shooting in 16:9, so that I can easily convert to the PSP format. Already, a device is manipulating how I work with my other devices and media. Yesterday, as I'm trying to decide what to put on my PSP, I opened MusicMatch Jukebox, and used the Portable Media option to downsample some MP3s to 64kbps so they'd fit on my memory card. Now I want a bigger memory card so that I don't have to suffer the lower sound quality (which really isn't too bad, surprisingly).

Sony could end up forcing a movement to standard 16:9 widescreen format for all sorts of media now, TV, photos, movies ... people may just start expecting the content to be formatted for the device, rather than doing the work themselves. It's a paradigm shift in the making (even if I hate that phrase).

Then my mind drifted towards Porn (and what healthy male's mind doesn't). Already the PSP has gained the name PornStation Portable, and it's not at all surprising, I'd even argue that it was inevitable. It's fairly well-known that the porn industry has driven a lot of the technology that we now take for granted ... VHS, CD-ROM, DVD ... they all got a big boost from the adult film market. So how long do you think it might take for the industry to start pressuring Sony to allow them to release films on the UMD format? I bet it's already happened. The question is, would Sony allow it to happen? They got burned when they didn't open the Betamax format to them. Sony might want to distance themselves for PR reasons, but considering porn getting onto the device is already happening, why shouldn't Sony make a buck. I guarantee that it's more likely that people will buy adult movies on UMD than standard DVD movies, simply because it would be more discreet. That would play right into Sony's business model.

My mind switched gears pretty quickly after that (the hot water running out might have had a catalyst effect), and I started thinking about possible other uses for the PSP that maybe even Sony hadn't thought about. I thought about the size of the device, the button layout, the screen definition, and it struck me ... the PSP would be very interesting as a detatchable face for a car stereo! The electronics for receiving radio, playing CDs, etc. could be kept in the car unit, and the PSP would just drive a UI. Perhaps it could even dump radio to Memory Stick so that you can take it with you when you get out of the car? No, you just listented to it, that's silly. Still, the possibility of this sort of application intrigues me. Would Sony ever create a car deck that sells without a face, or one so large you'd have to have a double-DIN housing for it? I don't know, but I think that there is potential there.