PSP really needed to be a cart or find some other way to improve the battery life and decrease load times. That would not kill the PSP as a multimedia device as you can store movies and music on memory sticks.

my cousin always kept saying "if i had an {insert letter} i could make {insert word using previous letter} when playing scrabble, admitedly she also asked me if the whole world used to be black and white [because of b+w photographs]...she was 16 at the time.

anyhoo, interesting idea, i kind of like the psp as it is really, i'm not personally interested in it but it provides a nice choice in the market as a kind of do-all system, if someone wants proper [not mobile phone] games, music, and a movie player on the move.

if it had been a game focused machine i would be no more interested in it than now, the main thing is the price really, if it was cheaper than the DS [assuming ds is still the £100 that it is] that is what makes a big difference to me.

p.s. to add to stories of my cousin, 2 years ago [18yo] she tried to make cheese on toast by putting both bread and cheese in a standard toaster. and more recently wondered why she couldn't mash potatoes she had boiled for 40 minutes,... she had boiled them whole.

@andrewpeirce

If the PSP and PS3 were as yuo put them I would not have bought them. I would have switched to 360 for a home console and the Ipod for a portable device. Games are the greatest thing in the planet IMO but they are not something you can do all the time. It is just too convenent to be able to match movie, go on the internet, play games, listen to music, and by stuff all from one device. Sony just needs to continue to do what they are doing with there platforms. Make them for the hardcore, give them great software, and make it easy to access. If they do that they should make a good bit of cash. In a perfect world the PS3 would have had dual cells and dual RSX with 2GB of RAM and cost $1299 but they had to compramise for the not so smart. I am more happy with the PS3 and PSP than I have been with any Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo product I have ever owned, and really thats all that counts.

I think Sony had a good opportunity to beat the Video iPod to the punch. Imagine if they had a downloadable video service a year before the video iPod. Instead they got stuck on the stupid idea of overpriced UMD movies.

If the PSP was $60 i'd buy 5 of them,

 A cheaper PS3 would sell more, but i dont think it would be sold out. For any machine to be sold out at this point in the calander and in its life cycle is very unusual. A cheaper PS3 doesnt automatically make it better than a PS2, a PS3 that has 100s of fantastic games would be better than a PS2. I wouldnt exactly call a 360 cheap either.

A PS3 at the same price as the 360 would probably be selling at roughly the same numbers, the 360 has a massive games advantage at the moment and if MS felt threatened by the PS3 they would probably be advertisng that fact alot more aggressivly. Sony, at this moment in time have very little to advertise in the first place.

There are alot of gamers that actually use their brain when choosing a console and buy it when theres a game to actually play on it (to their taste), I am one of those gamers, when MGS4 is out, i will buy a PS3 and if it still costs 400 quid at that point, thats not the issue, if its 100 quid less then all be a little better off :) 

 Hmm, have you heard of something called  "PC"?

 I diagree with your second paragraph. Your first makes sense; blu-ray is a huge gamble, but if it pays off one on end it will be worth it, if it fails on both console wars and format wars sony is in trouble, and if they both suceed it will be amazing. Personally I think Sony will get a very srtong 3rd place or tie with xbox 360, and will win the format war. But I don't think blu-ray will catch on to the masses for antoher 3-5 years. 

 Sometimes you can tell ahead of times if things are going to fail. For example, if I had been 10 years older, I would have realized that the N64 would fail. If I had been a few years older, it would of occured to me that Sony's PSP would not trounce the DS even though I thought it would. (at the time my Dad said the DS was better becuase the PSP was too pricey and wasn't focused enough on any one thing... was he right?) With the PS3, it was kinda obvoius even in 2006 that it woulnd't do well. With the xbox 360, I think it was rushed becuase Xbox was a money pit, and the only way nintendo could have forseen Sony console domination was in hindsight. 

You say Nintendo would have changed thier strategy. I mentioned that in my original post. Ninendo was somewhat concerned that the DS would fail. They had a new Gameboy in development. If the DS failed, they were going to fall back on the GBA, then realse the new Game Boy. As I siad in my post, I don't think this would have hlepd, becuase Sony would have more games for the PSP, and would be cheaper. Despite brand loyalty to Nintendo, I think Sony would come out victorius. It would be overkill, but theorietically Sony could also drop the price of the PSP to $59.99, taking large losses on hardware. Eventaully they would break even due to software sales, and eventaully they would not lose money on the hardware. This plan would not make Sony very much money in the PSP (possibly less than now) but it would be a deathblow to nintendo's handheld domination, effectivly knocking nintendo's new Gameboy out of the race for that generation.  

I will say that I skipped the entire thread to say this:

The PSP is better off now than it would have been if it was literally a portable PlayStation. Re-releasing games is nice, but it will not (and cannot) hold a system together on its own. There's a reason Virtual Console, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live Arcade aren't their own individual consoles. The PSP would have fallen apart if it was just reselling the entire old library again.