Silva Bokis

Sony USA bundles UMD discs with DVD films

Sony Pictures in the USA has will begin bundling together UMD and DVD releases of the same movie.

The first DVD-UMD bundles will be available in North America in late March. The first releases are  The Grudge, Resident Evil, Underworld, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and The Terminator to be followed by Ghostbusters, Mad Max, The Fifth Element and Snatch in late April.

Lets hope the same policy is adopted in the UK. Personally, I'm reluctant to buy movies on UMD - I'd rather have the DVD original and rip it to MemoryStick. But if the UMD is shipped with the DVD I'd have the best of both worlds.

White PSP top of Stuff magazine Cool List

The Sony PSP White - currenly officially available in Japan and unofficially available on import - tops Stuff Magazine's Cool List of the 'must own' gadgets of 2005.

Stuff says "It's the killer combo of functionality that makes the PSP this year's and next year's must-have."

Sony PSP tops the T3 Top 100

T3 magazine's Top 100 Best Gadgets of 2005 supplement awards the Sony PSP top spot. The Sony PSP is described as "the best gadget of the year" adding "it's a genuine contender for the best product of all time".

Better than my Jumper Bobble remover? - I don't think so.

PSP Screen grabs - Is there a solution?

Here's a plea to anyone out there with an inside line to the workings of the Sony PSP - Can you tell me how to take in-game screen grabs so that I can post them up here?

I've found PSPGrab v0.1 but it only seems to take pictures of the operating system screens, not in-game action.

Somebody make my day.. ..please.

Fifa 06 (PSP) - More comments

I managed to update my team list by connecting to the Net using the PSP wireless network access through my home broadband router. The update took just a few seconds and now my squad looks right.. ..with the exception of Abel Xavier - maybe EA Sports knows something about Mr T that we don't.

Fifa 06 review (PSP) - Totally unrealistic

I preordered Fifa 06 on PSP from Amazon & received it yesterday. This is a quick hands-on review with my initial impressions of the game.

First things first - I'm a Middlesbrough fan so I set the game up so that the Boro are my default team and the system automagically selected Newcastle as my local rivals. Rather than start off with a game against a shoddy, out of form Newcastle I decided to play against Sunderland.

This is where my claims that the game is totally unrealistic start. Boro beat Sunderland 3-1 with Viduka scoring 2 and Yakubu 1. Anyone who follows the Boro knows that for the game to be realistic Sunderland should have won the game 2-0. Oh yeah, and Ray Parlour played a blinder - someone at EA Sports is living on Fantasy Island.

Next up I take on Newcastle and we get beat 1-0 from an Alan Shearer goal scored in open play. What's going on? It's a travesty of a mockery of two more travesties of a mockery of a sham..

But seriously. Fifa 06 on PSP is actually a very good game. The gameplay is involving, the cut scenes when players remonstrate with the ref or celebrate a goal are excellent and the picture quality on the PSP is superb.

One drawback is that the teams are out of date - Michael Reiziger is still wearing a Boro shirt and Rochembach and Xavier do not appear on the team sheet (maybe the last one demonstrates some sort of ESP from the EA Sports Fifa 06 programmers) - However, I think it's possible to update the teams by going online with the PSP and downloading updates from EA Sports website - more on this in a future posting.   

Sony RDR-AX75 DVD Recorder records video for Sony PSP

Sony Japan has announced the RDR-AX75, a home DL DVD burner with 250Gb HDD that can encode video in Mpeg-4 AVC (H.264) - a 100% PSP compatible video format.
Once the video is recorded onto the RDR-AX75's hard disk you just need to stick your Memory Stick Duo in the slot provided and transfer the video onto the memory card. Depending on the selected encoding options, you can fit between 70 minutes and 250 minutes of video onto a 1Gb Memory Stick. In order to play back the Mpeg-4 AVC content, you need to have the 2.0 firmware on your PSP.Other models are coming with much larger HDDs of up to 400Gb. At present it is unknown if these models will be available outside of Japan.

Sony offers video downloads to Japanese PSP owners

The Register (UK) reports that Sony Japan is offering a new service - called Portable TV or P-TV - to Playstation Portable (PSP) owners. The service will initally offer free content such as movie trailers, promo videos and TV programmes from China and Korea. There are plans to expand the service to include premium material for a fee.

The P-TV content is encoded in MPEG 4 and H.264 format. Support for these formats was introduced on this week's version 2.0 firmware update to the PSP.

Sony PlayStation Portable selling well

With the Sony PSP still over a month away from its much awaited UK launch, Sony has been lauding sales figures at the annual PlayStation summit in Tokyo.

So far Sony has sold 5.07 million PSPs - with 2.33 million units sold in Japan and Asia and 2.74 million in the US and Canada. Sony has also sold 11.2 million copies of the 48 games available for the handheld console, selling 7.3 million in North America and 3.9 million in Japan and Asia. Sony says that there will be 150 titles on the shelves by the beginning of April 2006.

As far as films go the proprietary UMD format that the PSP uses has done well in North America, though not so well in the company’s native Japan, where only 400,000 UMD movies have been sold as opposed to 4.3 million units in North America – though that's actually 3.3 million units if you don’t include the copies of Spider Man 2 that shipped with the first batch of PSPs sold in America.

Sony PSP Goes Online - Official PSP Web Browser Announced

Sony Computer Entertainment will release a system software update for its PlayStation Portable (PSP) next week that will add several new functions to the handheld gaming device, including browse the Internet and download TV programs, the company said Thursday.