“Last week, when Sony announced that it was rolling out a line of flash-based portable digital music players, Apple Computer wasn’t exactly quivering in its market-stomping Cupertino boots. As Dave Marino-Nachison rightfully pointed out, ‘Investors have to wonder about the relevance of most things Sony does these days outside the video game business,'” Rick Aristotle Munarriz writes for The Motley Fool.
“But the iPod may now have some tougher competition on the sales floor, courtesy of Sony’s more relevant new offering — the PlayStation Portable,” Munarriz writes. “Why should the Apple digital-music behemoth worry about a gaming machine? Well, the PSP will be able to play back all forms of media, including music, through Memory Stick Duo storage devices. No, the capacity doesn’t match that of Apple’s iPod, and the PSP certainly doesn’t feel as stylish, but if Sony starts releasing some of its popular-music acts in the system’s UMD format to go along with the rewritable Memory Stick, things would start to get interesting.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Then give us a call, Rick, when “things get interesting.” PSP might be great for gamers, but the proprietary UMD format is typical Sony: introduce yet another format and complicate things unnecessarily. And, don’t forget, the PSP is about the size of a VHS video tape – it’s just physically too large to compete with iPod. These are different devices focused on different primary purposes; PSP plays games (and music secondarily) and iPod plays music (and games secondarily). Sony will probably sell a ton of these and Apple will also sell iPods to the many of the same people.