Robbie Bach: "PSP is a cautionary tale"

The Nintendo DS is doing amazingly well as a handheld console, that much we all know. The Sony PSP though? Not so good. The good news though is that Microsoft, the only console company without a handheld on the market, is keen to point out to sony what they're doing wrong.

Robbie Bach, President of the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft, outlined just why he thought the PSP had failed to make a splash in the market in an interview with VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi, calling the PSP a 'cautionary tale'.

"The PSP is a reasonably successful product at the profit-and-loss level. But as a product concept, there are cautionary tales to learn from it," said Bach.

"While it is good at producing audio, it’s not a good music player because it doesn’t have local storage (except for flash memory slots). You can’t keep your music there," continued Bach - though he didn't stop there and went on to outline how the handheld is awful at video as well as music.

"It has a beautiful screen, but you can only get the video under the Universal Media Disc format. That format hasn’t been successful."

Hm. Is there anything Microsoft thinks the PSP is actually good at? Apparently not.

"On a game level, it has done well. But even there, it is mostly PlayStation 2 ports. There isn’t much original content," said Robbie as he put the final nail in the coffin.

Have you got a PSP? How do you rate it compared to other PMPs and the Nintendo DS? Let us know in the forums.

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