The beast is unleashed

Unless your head has been firmly entrenched in the sunny Scarborough sands this past week, you’ll be aware that Sony released their handheld phenomenon the PSP Midnight Wednesday. Many queued on Oxford Street to get their hands on the shiny Game Boy killer. Many seem very happy.

All this week you couldn’t step off a train in London without being slapped in the face by one of the many PSP advertisement posters mostly depicting ordinary people cornered by giant symbols. One shows a screaming brat of a girl faced with the four symbols that have sprouted from the soil of her garden. Another depicts a suited businessman, a reflection of many of the people who would witness the ad, almost being crushed by the symbols. Add to this, posters of the most high profile games – Virtua Tennis etc – and you can see Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and others have gone big-guns on getting general tech-savvy consumers excited about the PSP.

But one thing the posters reveal is what Sony marketing and sales people feel the PSP is all about – and that is the multimedia functions. Sony see it as a hub for everyone’s entertainment needs first, a handheld gaming console second. That’s not to say they will neglect the gaming side of the PSP, but they feel it’s so much more.

Look at the four symbols – you have the game pad, an obvious one there. Then you have the film reel symbol, clearly highlighting the movie capabilities of the console. Next is the music symbol, a no-brainer. Last but not least is the camera (meaning it can display pictures, not take them). All four symbols are presented to the consumer as equal features. Gaming isn’t more predominant. Sony is giving a message to the gadget buying world: ‘the PSP will combine your entire entertainment spectrum in one single, utopian portable device’.

This marketing campaign, while effective to the casual user (perhaps one not familiar with the term ‘homebrew’ or the nuances of file transfers), is one you and I can perhaps condemn as a fallacy. Sony would have you believe watching movies, browsing the Internet and listening to music on your PSP is as easy as one, two, three. Well, it is if you stick to the program and do things the way Sony want you to, but as soon as you start tinkering – as soon as you start putting your own movies on the PSP rather than buying them all over again on UMD, as soon as you start clamouring for more games than officially released – things get tricky. Not impossible, but tricky.

So while this utopian connected entertainment hub isn’t quite as utopian as it might first appear, it’s a fantastic start. One question still remains though: are consumers ready for it? Will the great British public think handheld game console first, movies and music second? Or will those thousands of posters across Britain convince them that it’s a portable PC instead? Only time will tell.

This article is taken from the Sunday Supplement – Pro-G’s weekly look at the events of the week. Read the full article here.