Jeff Hoy, American

Sony recently unveiled a slightly redesigned version of their PSP handheld game system.  Some of the highlights of the redesign are a slimmer, lighter design, longer battery life, and an increased amount of memory to help speed up the notoriously slow load times.  The mysterious IR port at the top of the original PSP has been removed as well.  One of the most talked about new features is the ability to do TV output using a breakout cable that plugs into the port by the headphone jack.  This is something that a lot of PSP owners have been asking about for a while.  Prior to this there were third-party accessories that added TV out capability to the PSP, but they were large, bulky attachments that were basically small CCD cameras that just took video of the PSP screen and converted it for output to TV.  The TV out for the new PSP is a far cry better than all the other implementations out there.

All PSPs also have a feature called Remote Play which allows you to connect and use your Playstation 3 console from pretty much anywhere there’s a wireless access point.  You can use Remote Play to stream video, music, compatible games, and other content over the internet from your PS3 to your PSP.  This is a cool feature that I like quite a bit, though I haven’t used it much outside of my home network.  From my experience with such things, Remote Play looks to be a VNC server on the PS3 and a VNC client on the PSP.  I’m sure that’s simplifying it a bit, but I think that’s basically what it is.  This has led me to consider the following.  Why couldn’t Sony reverse the process to add TV output to all PSPs through the PS3, not just the new version?  Isn’t it possible to add a VNC server to the PSP and a client to the PS3?  I know that perhaps processing power is probably the main hurdle stopping this idea.  However, the latest version of the firmware for the PSP unlocked the full clock speed of the PSPs CPU.  So now it runs at a full 333Mhz instead of the 233Mhz that it used to run at.  Is that extra 100Mhz not enough to capture, compress, and send the required data over the network?  The PS3 could do all the other work from there, including upscaling from the PSPs 480 x 272 resolution to something a little more fitting of a HDTV.  I’ve run VNC servers on very old computers, using slower processors and higher resolutions without a problem.

This idea may not be perfect for gaming, but for watching UMD videos I think it would work out just fine.