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Friday, June 16, 2006
By Christina VanGinkel
The Sony PSP handheld is a great little gaming machine. It also comes with the capability to watch movies that come on the same sized disks that their game offerings do. My youngest son has had his PSP for almost a year now, and has taken advantage of both of these uses extensively, collecting quite a collection of both games and movies.
The Sony PSP is also capable of providing access to the Word Wide Web. While he and I both knew that, and had actually sat down with it once to try and connect it to our wireless network at home, we were unsure of just how to do so, as our network is set up to keep out hackers and such, which apparently included ourselves. Not knowing enough about how to add the PSP to our network, we essentially gave up after spending hours trying to add the correct password, etc.
Yesterday, my nephew was visiting, home on leave from the service. When he found out that his young cousin has a PSP but was not able to use the Internet, he sat down and had it all set up in under five minutes. Just goes to show you what a bit of knowledge can do to make life easier.
The first thing we made note of within minutes of having it all ready to go, was that if my son intended to access the Internet via the PSP, he was going to need to add a larger memory card to it. The small one that comes standard with it is just not big enough, to accommodate virtually any amount of web surfing.
Why would anyone with a Sony PSP want to surf the web with his or her handheld gaming machine though? The answer is really quite simple when you think about it. The PSP has games that can be updated via the web. Actually, that is where the access to the Web on the PSP originated from in the first place. The game Wipeout Pure comes with built in web browser access so that you can download updates for the game. Once people realized how simple it was to get there, as is common with people fascinated by the electronic wonders that are so common in our lives, we of course wanted more, more this time meaning access to the whole web via this small machine whose main intent and purpose was to play games and watch movies.
Well, it was interesting enough that it kept my thirteen year old occupied for quite some time. Actually, he played with the feature on his cousin's PSP; as his cousins had a large memory stick added; where with his own he had problems because of lack of memory. He of course now wants a larger memory stick for his own PSP.
My son also learned how to download MP3 music files to his PSP, which again pointed to a need for a larger memory stick. We had priced memory sticks when we had first purchased his PSP, but at the time they seemed like quite an expensive add on, and as he already owned an MP3 player, we did not feel it was necessary to spend the extra money. My nephew pointed out that as with most electronics, the price of the memory sticks had dropped dramatically from when they were first introduced. We popped into Amazon.com online and found that for a Sony 1GB Memory Stick PRO Duo Media card, the cost was a reasonable $37.43, and if we wanted to double that size, we could go with the Sony 2 GB High Speed Memory Stick PRO Duo Media card for $58.74. This second card, the 2 GB originally retailed for close to two hundred dollars, so prices have defiantly come down.
If you have a Sony PSP or one of your kids do, and you or they have not yet tried the World Wide Web access, or used it to download MP3 files, in part due to the high cost of the memory sticks, now is as good as time as you will ever find. So go ahead and splurge for a stick of memory, especially with prices as low as this.
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