PSP Firmware Upgrade: 3.80

The other night, as I do from time to time, I checked the Network upgrade option in my PSP and found that there was a new version available for download (as of 18th December 2007); version 3.80.

The version that I had installed was 3.72 so I figured that the new version that was released should have some good features for skipping a few revisions to 3.80.

Sony outline on their site that the new or upgraded features for this revision are as outlined below:

Network:
You can now import OPML files under (RSS Channel).
You can now view photos displayed on a PSP system that is connected to the Internet under (RSS Channel).

Video:
You can now preview each scene under [Scene Search].

Music:
The number of visual player types that can be used has been increased.

NEW:
Internet Radio has been added. You can now play programs (audio content) distributed by Internet radio stations.

Internet Radio is the biggie in this release and being on Internode where you can access radio streams for free I was keen to try this out on the PSP. The service is provided or facilitated by using the ShoutCast network; full details on this can be found by visiting this page.

The one thing that I found was that it was a pain to find the station that you like using Sony’s interface. So I figured that I would try to connect to the stream using the web browser as it seemed that the radio player acted as a plug in, so it may work.

ShoutCast.com took a while to load and the search results took even longer to load for some reason, but eventually it all loaded with no problems; now to test with the PSP browser to test if the plug in loaded as I expected.

Unfortunately that was not to be the case and I was prompted to save the .pls file for the stream. Next trick was to try and load the stream via the music player in the PSP; no luck there either

So it seems that the ability to utilise the player is only available through the Internet Radio Player that you utilise through the Sony Service. As a result, being able to connect to your station of choice is something which is a very hit and miss affair and in short can be a real pain to achieve. I hope that in the next release Sony updates the software so that you can search for a station making the task a lot easier.

Other than that the firmware upgrade doesn’t seem to have caused any issues.
My other main wish is that the Sony PSP team can produce a developers kit which will allow us a choice of browser, although functional, the browser included is a pain to use at times. I would love to see Firefox or Opera for the PSP giving us real tabs, not the sad excuse that Sony call tabs in the current version.