Ugh...web browsing on a handheld without a touchscreen? No thanks. I heard about this the other day through IGN, and I think the PSP--if this stuff all pans out--is quickly losing its focus. Yeah, it's nice to have a bundled, all-in-one handheld. The problem, and the reason no such device *cough*
N-Gage*cough has done well thus far, is because it's more important for a machine to serve its purpose WELL than just to do a million and one things poorly.
The closest to a successful all-in-one handheld that there's been so far is the Tapwave Zodiac, and the reason it's succeeding is because the company gave up on trying to market it as a games machine. It's a PalmPilot, and a DAMN good one. It's a great PDA with good battery life, a large and bright display, and lots of functionality (dual SD slots, wireless Internet, MP3 and video playback), and it has the hardware necessary to game...but that's stretching it. So when it started to falter like so many others have, the company said "okay, this is too much. We're overextending. Just push the multimedia abilities, and don't trump the gaming up so much."
The N-Gage is a miserable failure. Game.com, same thing. Cell phones are beginning to get rather bloated, but they still don't do any of their tasks well...except making phone calls. Gameboy is and always has been a success, because it was designed well and marketed well specifically for a set purpose: playing games. You can get add-ons to do other things if you want, but these are optional for those who "need" such functionality and not part of the core system.
Yes, I think it would be neat to have a GOOD all-in-one. But again, there's no point unless you can do those tasks well. This is why--despite the fact that some tiny third party has made one for every hardware generation--PIMs have never caught on for Gameboy. It's the wrong hardware for the task: the resolution's too low and the interface is wrong. There has been talk of going online with DS, too...I'm all for having a PIM app and an email/SMS client for the machine; its dual displays and touch interface would work well for this. But due to the screen resolution, I don't see any purpose in a full-blown web broswer. It would be a waste of R&D effort on the company's part, because there's an inherent limit in the system design. The same goes even moreso for the PSP: the screen still isn't large enough for proper browsing, and its interface is far, far worse than the DS' for such a task.
Similarly, having a tiny but clunky external keyboard and no pointing device (except maybe a half-assed analog stick implementation...remember how "easy and convenient" that was on Dreamcast? Yeah
) is not how you want to browse the Internet...especially on a machine that doesn't even have half-VGA resolution. I am very proud of my Zodiac for making these "full-size" tasks accessible on the go, and even IT is pushing it sometimes.
I see this as something that people will hear about and go "ooh, neat!" until they actually sit down with it...at which point they'll promptly get frustrated and/or bored and seldom if ever make use of that function again.
