Why does the gaming industry keep attacking the PSP? It's a great mobile platform even if left crippled by the standard Sony firmware, put a custom firmware on it and it truly flies. There is not one single feature or game ob the DS that would even make me think of buying one but i couldn' live without my PSP and even DS owners i know will grudgingly admit that the "features" of the DS pale when compared.

The only 2 issues with the PSP is that Sony have spent so much time concentrating of flogging the PS3 they have largely ignored or alienated the PSP owners, and that they intentionally cripple the device to flog UMD movies.

The best example is the PS1 emulator built into the 3.xx series firmwares. Technically anyone could take their old PS1 games, convert them and run them on the PSP. Sony decides that this is a bad idea and forces people to buy the games again (the games are just an encrypted ISO of the original game), fair enough if a little cheeky. They also decide that you can only enjoy this wonderful emulator by buying the games from the PS3 store, why do i have to buy a very expensive console for this when there is a perfectly function PSP store? I can only assume the reason is to try and drum up more PS3 sales leaving people like me (who don't want one) out in the cold. Anyone in the know is probably aware that the custom firmwares bypass this rather unfriendly decision and allow PSP owners to package the PS1 games they still own.

As for the video, well we can encode our own video and then learn the bewildering foldernames needed to make it play on the PSP but we can only use low bitrate and 320x240 resolution (the PSP screen is 480x272). Why? To make UMD movies look better that's why, again we are crippled to advance sales of another of their projects. Enter the custom firmware again.

Now given that i have a lovely big screen (widescreen format), swappable memory sticks up to 8Gb that i can fill with downloadable demos, my own encoded videos, oddles of MP3's to listen to whilst wandering around and almost any PS1 game i can still buy running on it why would i want a DS with it's limited features? The only possible answer is for games that the PSP doesn't have, and that's Sony's fault for ignoring a very capable mobile platform.

The custom firmware makers have not ignored the PSP and have not only un-crippled the device in terms of the video and the PS1 emulator, but homebrew developers have also created an open-source SDK allowing anyone with some knowledge of C to develop their own software and given games like No Gravity (http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/) you can see that not all of these are cheesy 2d ripoffs of other games. Try that on your DS (oh wait, you need a $100 flash programmer for that making the DS more expensive than the PSP for homebrew)!

I would say that the PSP should not be dropped as it has a very dedicated (if largely ignored) fan community. It just seems that Sony is making the same mistakes with the PS3 that is has with the PSP.