PSP: 'cause its so cool!

I had lunch with some friends (former collegues) on Sunday. Had some interesting discussions on our careers, tech trends, business in general. It was a meeting of techies - one of whom incidentally has turned to, as some of my friends may say, 'the dark side' and transformed into a management consultant, whose tech background comes in handy. It was fun to meet all of them together again after these couple of months.

Obviously as one would imagine, the conversation also included an analysis of the latest gadgetry - and in our case the PSP - play station portable. It found it funny that my friend bought a PSP - especially considering that he is no avid gamer. His excuse? - 'its just too cool not to buy!' I admit, the PSP is one of those devices, I would love to buy and keep in my collection, even if I never end up using it. The device simply blows my mind everytime I think about it. Technically, its almost flawless - industrial design, functionality (minus its lack of bluetooth) and of course the video and 3-D graphics rendering capability. This is truly a leap in mobile computing - considering its form factor and feature set. We've almost come to point where we take laptops and their increasingly functionality for granted. The PSP on the other hand, with its integrated WiFi and graphics rendering capability truly opened up my eyes to the potential of mobile multimedia. If they can somehow make the form factor a little sleeker and smaller, and incorporate a decent sized hard drive, Sony could integrate the Walkman MP3 player with the PSP to give the iPod a run for their money. I suppose the only things next would be a DVBH tuner and a GSM processor (from Sony Ericsson). It might seem like the Doom-ed (pun intended) Nokia n-Gage all over again, but this time, it would be executed by someone who's truly a leader in all the pieces..... hmm....