The new Playstation Portable is being marketed as a 'total entertainment device'. It's certainly a long way from the Gameboy, writes Donald Clarke.
In simpler times a phone was a phone, a computer was a computer and a Walkman was the size of a coffin. Watches sometimes told the date, and I once saw a shooting-stick with a compass mounted in its shaft. But generally you knew what things were for. The Nintendo Gameboy, for instance, was designed to deter infants from any dangerous inclinations towards reading.
These days everything does everything. Phones take photographs. Computers make phone calls. You can store addresses on your personal stereo. And the Gameboy's latest successor - Sony's gorgeously shiny Playstation Portable (PSP) - is, the makers claim, not just for kids. Sure enough, the PSP makes the Nintendo DS, its major competitor in the hand-held games console market, look positively Soviet in design.
"We see it as a more adult product than the DS," says Niall O'Hanrahan, managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment Ireland. "That is a very kid-oriented device. We will carry games that have an 18 certificate and the style and design should appeal to the older end."
Crucially for O'Hanrahan's strategy, the PSP does a great deal more than play games. Using Sony's new proprietary media storage system, the grandly named Universal Media Disc, the machine can display films and other video on its 11cm (4.3-inch) screen. There are currently only 11 movies available - mainly from Columbia Tristar, Sony's own Hollywood studio - but O'Hanrahan says Disney, Paramount and others are eager to climb on board.
The PSP can also store audio and, with its sleek, none-more-black look, could conceivably be used to win over the iPod generation. The largest memory stick available is "only" one gigabyte, much less juicy than the average iPod, but that does give it the same storage capacity as the most powerful iPod Shuffle.
If none of these comparisons mean anything to you, then you are probably not in the PSP's target demographic (and probably stopped reading when you saw the grim words "proprietary media storage system"). Suffice to say, for €254.99 you get a dark lozenge on which you can, while travelling on the train, watch Spider-Man 2, kill aliens and listen to pop music. Games console? You speak the language of Chaucer, my friend. This is, in O'Hanrahan's words, "a total entertainment device".
Last Thursday, HMV on Grafton Street invited Dublin's total entertainment enthusiasts to have a glance at the PSP prior to its official launch on September 1st. Strange to relate, very few of them seemed interested in the machine's ability to play music or surf the internet. With a look of eager determination unseen since Levi-starved East Germans stormed the Berlin Wall, a horde of teenage game fanatics spilled down the stairs and threw themselves hungrily on the consoles. Thumbs began tapping furiously.
I saw all this out of the corner of my eye, because I was myself focused on the latest version of Wipeout, a futuristic racing game whose stunning simulacrum of bowel-juddering speed led me to set aside all serious career plans in the mid-1990s. I found that the air-brake has become easier to use than in earlier editions and the ship's tendency to drift through the scenery on sharper corners has been restrained without causing any reduction in . . .
Ahem. Where was I? Andreas and Kevin, two articulate youths of, I would guess, Leaving Cert age, didn't give a hoot about the PSP's ability to screen movies. After some prodding, Andreas admitted that he might be prepared to listen to the odd song on it, but was much more interested in discussing the - to him regrettable - preponderance of racing games among the initial releases. "The graphics are brilliant," they said in unison.
Mick, a pleasant gothish young man, and his companion, the slightly less ashen Emma, also raved about the graphics. Interestingly, Mick initially denied ever having owned a hand-held console, before suddenly remembering the solid-fuel slab lying at the bottom of his cupboard. "Well, apart from a Gameboy."
Sony will be happy to hear that the company's machine is barely regarded as the same species as its neo-Pleistocene predecessor. Like Andreas and Kevin, the pallid duo appeared uninterested in the PSP's way with music and video.
When we see a consumer durable it seems we still expect one clear answer to the question: what does it do? Phones are still primarily phones. And games consoles, however generously banged and whistled they may be, may still be principally regarded as just that.