Pure Digital Thought

So after several delays, Sony finally released their newest firmware update for the Sony PSP. One topic that has been up for debate is whether people should update to the newest firmware. I’ve had some time to play with the 2.0 firmware so I wanted to let others out there know what I think about it.

First off, if you like homebrew PSP games, then you shouldn’t update to 2.0. Then again, if you have homebrew you already know this. I missed out on the homebrew fun because I got tricked into the 1.5.1 PSP update. There were ideas a while ago that 1.5.1 would have new functionality. Then it turned out to be “security updates” that later really turned out to be “break your shit updates”. So, I bascially got screwed out of homebrew. Therefore, if you’re like me and got stuck with 1.5.1 or 1.5.2 then you could upgrade to 2.0 if you want. Some people are hanging on with 1.5.1 or 1.5.2 and hoping that perhaps someone will figure a way around the “security fixes” that make it so you can’t run homebrew games and apps on your PSP. Anways, I went ahead and got 2.0 figuring that I’m already screwed on homebrew and if I have to wait for a fix to the “security fixes” then I’d rather play with 2.0 a little.

The biggest addition is the web browser. The web browser is an *extremely* basic browser. Some things are not apparent, like how the brower uses tabs for new pages that would usually have brought up a new browser window on a PC. You can’t tell if it was opened in a new tab or if it’s in the same tab. You can press square and the browser will display the tab colors at the top. So, you *can* tell if you’re in a new tab if you memorized which colored tab you were in previously.

The browser is also limited by the memory of the PSP which isn’t all that great. So, while some sites might be fine, don’t go hitting a site with a ton of images and expect to not get a message saying there isn’t enough memory to render the page. I know I just disappointed all of the pr0n fiends out there… I told you to stick with 1.5 didn’t I?

The update does have a couple other addons like the ability to put your own background on the PSP or sharing images. I think that nice and all but I don’t really care for it too much. It is encouraging to see that the PSP is getting some extra feature that hopefully will round it out to be a pretty good system within the year.

Here are some screenshots of the browser in action and rendering this site.

[thumb:6:l] [thumb:5:l] [thumb:4:l]

As you can see, the browser looks pretty good. Obviously, unless the web site is formatted for a mobile device, like the PSP Portal Site, then it isn’t going to fit on the screen. However, the browser has two settings that let you adjust how it renders the page. One mode tries to make the page fit by shrinking images. The other mode will actually move elements around and if it detects a sidebar and a main content area, it will render those under each other rather than on the side.

The browser is pretty slow but I’m hoping that it could be optimized in a future update. Also, the current version of the browser doesn’t cache anything since it cannot directly access the disk for caching. Maybe that could be an improvement for the next version.

All in all, the browser is a neat feature to have, and it’s hard to tell if it’s better than homebrew. We’ll have to see how things pan out. However, there have been new reports of Sony opening a portal site for Europe that will allow European owners to download content such as movies clips, games, etc with the browser. So, perhaps Sony has something like that planned for the US.