Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

This morning I went to EBGames and exchanged my unopened copy of Twisted Metal for Lumines. I bought Twisted Metal to try out the online playing, but I've been reading that the online servers are still having troubles. Lumines is getting great reviews even though it just looks like modern Tetris. Tetris was pretty addictive, though, and was probably the killer app for the Original GameBoy.

I got up early this morning to download some movies from http://www.connect.com/psp/index.html to my PSP. I found their flash tutorial on how to download movies kind of confusing. The pdf version at http://www.connect.com/psp/tutorial/tutorial.pdf was much clearer. I downloaded a bunch of trailers, a Speed Racer episode, and an ABC News clip. These took longer than I expected over my dsl connection, but their server might be getting hammered.

The process to get movies on your PSP is pretty clunky, which is surprising considering how elegant everything else is about the PSP. For some reason the movies to under a folder called \MP_ROOT\100MNV01 under the root of the memory stick. I would have expected it under something like \PSP\movies to match all the other media, but that's not the case. Also, it seems that the movies have to follow that strange naming convention (MPVC0043.mp4), which is very odd. It seems like movie playing was tacked on at the last minute and doesn't have the polish of the downloaded music or pictures. Kind of annoying, but I'll probably write something to automate this soon, if someone hasn't already done it.

At the train station, I sat on a bench fiddling with my PSP underneath a huge ad for the PSP, which probably looked pretty funny. On the train I watched a bunch of the stuff I downloaded. Picture quality was excellent. The option to choose the onscreen movie dimensions was a little tricky at first, but pretty quick once I got the hang of it. I didn't even bother trying the included headphones and used some massive over-ear Sony headphones that I have. Still, for watching movies on a train, it was still pretty tough to hear with the volume all the way up. Those headphones are open-back, though, which doesn't help. I have a pair of closed-back Aiwa headphones in my cube that block out much more sound, which I'll try on my way home tonight.

I watched the trailers and Speed Racer at an accelerated / tivo /speedwatching rate, and then watched some more of Spiderman2. I forgot how great a movie that was. I need to be careful what kinds of things I watch on my PSP. With the great visuals and some nice headphones, it's a surprisingly immersive viewing experience. I need to keep from laughing too much out loud. And no ripped movies that are tearjerkers. I don't want to start welling up with a bunch of people looking at me.

At work I spent most of the morning demoing my PSP to everyone and answering questions about it. People see it and are just blown away. I could have taken orders for it right there. I expected people to balk at the $250 cost, but everyone was jumping all over it. They said they paid more for their iPod which didn't play movies or games. It's interesting how many people don't know about the PSP. Sony did an interesting thing with this launch; there wasn't a huge media blitz leading up to it. Most of the people who bought one that I talked to are either geeks that follow this sort of thing or heard about it through word of mouth. I've been reading that the ads and commercials for the PSP are going to start bombarding everyone right after launch to maintain the hype.

Well, gotta run. Tonight I'm getting together with Russ to play some multiplayer PSP games, so I'm sure I'll have more to report tomorrow.