NewInstance

I bought a Sony PSP during last winter, and I am very happy of that. The videgames are amazing, I didn’t imagine that there were games so impressive on a so little machine. In particular I appreciated Ridge Racer, Final Fantasy the war of the Lions, God of War: Chains of Olympus, and many more.
Recently I managed to enable the PSP to homebrews: I bought a Pandora Battery + TimeMachine memorystick on ebay, and now I have a vague idea on how all this magic work.
I’d like to go deeper on technical aspects of PSP and learn more on how to do some development, but it’s very hard to find information. It has to be said that it’s a pity that Sony don’t provide a development kit freely to the user community.

Now that my PSP is running an unlocked firmware, I have the pleasure to use ebookr to read PDF files on the PSP. Unfortunately this homebrew is not working on latest custom firmwares, but searching the net you can find one that runs on 3.xx firmwares: Bookr v0.7.1 – with CFW 3.xx and 1.50 support. This application is a must, waiting for sony to release an official ebook reader. Possibly Sony prefers to sell products like the Sony Reader, but I don’t think that the PSP could compete with those jewels. Even having ebookr on PSP I am still planning to buy an Iliad Reader (some of my friends are convincing me).

Sony is continuously adding more features to the official firmwares, like internet radio, web browser, skype… but an ebook reader is absolutely necessary. Ebookr is not perfect, but performs enough well. It is also possible to watch movies on the PSP and to hear music, but the available formats are restricted, so you can’t use divx for example.
Also it would be very nice to have a JVM running on PSP; I know that some hackers are working on a port, but I doubt it will ever reach a usable status.

Also to mention that you can use the PSP as car navigator buying the needed accessories (GPS/Software/Maps).

Other hints to Sony: a good PIM (please don’t look at Windows Mobile as example!), a touch screen, a standard mobile phone integration, an internal GPS, and less firmware restrictions, will make of the next PSP a must have. And I’ll finally drop my HTC-3300 into the trash basket.