The hack is the work of “foo foo” and it works as advertised. Spin up an audio track, and watch the little lights pump up in down with the beat.

It’s no Korg DS-10, but then again few things are. At the very least this hack would provide you with literally minutes of fun as you wait for Sony to get its act together and release the mythical PSPad, PSP Phone, or whatever it ends up being. [Foo foo via Engadget]

Open the Library
There was a time when I might have suggested that Sony jettison its media companies, setting music and movies adrift so that the electronics divisions would no longer have to be held hostage by internal squabbles over piracy.

I’ve come around. While Sony Pictures has had its ups and downs over the last decade, the addition of the movie and television libraries gives Sony a strength that none of the other Big Four have – if they can loosen up.

Microsoft has games and Office; Apple sells a lot of music, but owns no content beyond software; Google has YouTube and user-generated content, but creates little professional content of its own. In this space Sony stands alone, with a rich library of music, television, movies and games.

Imagine if buying a Sony product gave you simple, inexpensive access to that vast archive. Not even for free, necessarily. (Although Sony should continue to be liberal with its media giveaways, like it did when launching the PSP, bundling Spider-Man on UMD.) But all of it at your fingertips with an ease-of-use that put its competitors to shame.

In theory this is the aim of the upcoming Sony Online Service. (The “S.O.S.” name is temporary, if apropos.) Sony has discussed plans to translate the moderately successful PlayStation Network into a cross-device infrastructure, allowing not just media downloads but media uploads, taking not only a shot at iTunes but at cloud services like Flickr and Picasa.

That’s fine and dandy in theory – but why would a user choose Sony, a company that has launched and then quickly abandoned several other media stores and sharing services in the past? When they closed the Connect store, they stranded customers who had bought into their proprietary ATRAC-based DRM. When ImageStation went bust, they migrated people to Shutterfly and cited “many capable online photo services” as a reason for the closure. Why start investing dollars and time and work and memories in a company that just five years ago allowed rootkits to be installed to protect the sanctity of its media?

There’s a trust issue at play, perhaps bigger than Sony realises, as its halting and horrible missteps have made many potential customers leery of its commitment.

Lucky for Sony, there’s a new age dawning in media, one based heavily in the cloud, with subscriptions taking the place of media downloads – especially in video, where customers have yet to invest heavily in pay-per-download models simply due to prohibitive costs and the infinite format war.

Sony should send the Online Service into the world with a bang: open access to Sony’s media library free for a month. Or three. Take the write-down as a marketing expense, allow millions of users free access to the media that Sony controls, and use the media – not the hardware – as a loss leader to get people hooked on Sony again.

(And if they did it without DRM that’d be even better, but I’m not asking for miracles here.)

A comprehensive and liberal attitude towards online media would go a long way towards shoring up Sony’s more traditional media sales strategy, as well. Blu-ray, after a long and costly battle, has finally won – just as download and streaming content is taking hold in the video space. Buying a Blu-ray disc currently guarantees me access to the video on many non-Sony devices – why not give me access to that same movie on all of my Sony products? I bought Ghostbusters on Blu-ray – now let me watch it whenever I like on whatever Sony device I choose just by grabbing it from the cloud. That would certainly make me more eager to spend money on physical copies.

Become the Best Android Maker In the World
Sony’s software showing is weak. Its mobile devices, for a brief moment a bellwether in the “small and useful” space, are now bogged down in a swamp of too-little, too-late design. (More on that in a bit.) Its arcane PlayStation architecture is, according to many game developers, confusing. That was fine when PlayStation was the biggest game in town, but with the Xbox and Wii eclipsing PS3 sales and the DS and iPhone taking a huge chunk of the potential PSP market, Sony’s inability to provide powerful, easy-to-use software for developers has been a huge factor in its poor showing this console generation. (Things are looking up, but on the beam the PlayStation 3 has been a disaster for Sony exactly when it didn’t need one.)

There is hope, and its name is Android. At first it might seem counterintuitive to suggest that Sony lean heavily on a product under the aegis of a company that by all rights should be a chief competitor. But for all its not-quite-actually-open-source issues, Android exists primarily so that Google can be insulated from Apple and Microsoft – the two companies that most threaten Sony, as well. In this case, the enemy of Sony’s enemy could be their friend – especially when Google isn’t interested in providing a full range of consumer products that use Android.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Sony used a competitor’s software: The entirety of the Vaio PC line runs Microsoft Windows, and its Sony Ericsson phones run Nokia’s Symbian OS or – oh look! – Android.

And in this case, Google’s weakness is Sony’s strength: great hardware. And adopting Android across all its devices would do nothing to impede Sony’s own platform goals. In fact, that a Sony-branded Android device could have access to the broad range of Android applications as well as Sony’s Online Service and media offerings would do much to set Sony apart from the glut of also-rans that make up much of the current non-phone Android marketplace.

At its heart, Android is “just” Linux. Sony’s no stranger to Linux – the PlayStation 2 and 3 both have dabbled with Linux support. But Android is Linux-as-platform, a trusted and understood consumer branding. (Or, you know, that’s the goal.) It is, as far as operating systems go, as good or better than anything Sony has ever cooked up themselves. Rather than spending years on disparate software platforms for each device, Sony’s software engineers could spend their time building easy-to-use and beautiful user experiences on top of a unified platform. (Remind me again why the Sony Dash doesn’t use Android?)

Ditch Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson’s products are late, underpowered, designed by madmen and utterly irrelevant. Worse, the company is helmed by a man too proud to make a flagship phone with Google. Fire him. Rescue the engineers. Let the rest of the company burn.

This business has changed. There are no phones anymore. There are simply things that also phone. That there is not a PSP Phone in my hands right now is a travesty, one surely due entirely to the fact that Sony is entangled in a bizarre partnership with a European company trying to make phones that appeal to a feature phone market that started to go away a decade ago.

Sony Ericsson is a stone around Sony’s neck and should be cut free as soon as possible. Telephony and mobile data are an intrinsic part of the electronic landscape. Even if a modern phone is really only a radio and a bit of software, it’s too important to be anywhere but in-house – and increasingly, in every product.

PlayStation Everything
If you ask the average person on the street what their favourite Sony product is, more often than not you’ll hear “PlayStation”. There’s a couple of reasons for that – not the least of which is that it’s the last Sony product to completely stand apart from its competitors.

It’s a valuable and – when executed correctly – profitable brand. As for the hardware itself, the PlayStation 3 is powerful.

So why is it so half-assed? Why is it that I can spend hundreds of dollars on a PlayStation 3 and still not use it as a DVR? Or as a powerful, slick media centre to access my media files? (You can do it, yes, but it’s no Boxee or Plex.) Why does Sony sell any other Blu-ray players at all?

The PlayStation of the last few years is battered, but not broken. Half-hearted and poorly conceived projects like PlayStation Home have shown how disconnected Sony is from its users, but the device, brand and platform still have a lot to give.

I have four boxes connected to my television: All three major consoles, plus a Mac Mini. The reason I have the Mac Mini? It’s because none of the consoles do a proper job as a media centre, giving me universal access to every type of media I consume, from streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, to movies and television I’ve ripped and downloaded (legally or otherwise), to DVDs and Blu-ray. (The Mini doesn’t do Blu-ray, but since I only own, like, six Blu-ray discs that hasn’t been a dealbreaker.)

Sony is trying. Netflix has come to the PS3, if somewhat awkwardly. But accessing files on the network still takes a UPnP server and other bits of annoying acronymic magic that makes my $US350 console from a multi-billion dollar company feel gimpy and half-baked.

In the portable space, it’s ever worse: I don’t know a single person who bought a PSPgo. And why would they? It was clear from the outset that the PSPgo was a toe in the water of the digital-distribution stream, not the sort of cannonball into online game downloads that is already being explored to profitable depths by Apple.

But a PSP phone? A nicely designed portable device that has access to the library of amazing PSP titles, plus all the movies, music, and (hopefully Android) apps that Sony could provide? They’d sell a million on Day One, and have developers banging down their doors to let them create the beautiful 3D titles that the PSP is known for.

Thank goodness there are rumours that a PlayStation phone is happening – but Sony has made similar sashays before, only to jilt us later.

Keep It In the Lab
We’ve shown the absolutely monstrous number of products Sony has for sale (to US consumers) at any given time. To some extent it’s understandable, if not forgivable. It’s one of the strengths of megacorps to be able to shotgun lots of products onto the market to see what sticks, and diversification has been part of the Sony strategy for decades.

But it’s gotten out of hand – and worse, it’s turned Sony into a company that has stopped saying “Look what we’ve invented”, to instead murmur, “We can do that, too.”

I’ve written about how Apple’s restraint has given them a product lineup that’s easy to understand – and easy to invest in as a customer. Buy an Apple product and you can be sure that it’ll be supported for years to come. (And that it’ll be superseded by an improved version in a year, of course.)

But Sony is spitting out products that even they don’t believe in. The Mylo internet communicator? The Vaio P netbook? The PSPgo? The Sony Dash? The UX Series UMPC micro whatever-the-hell? A $US3000, 2.0-megapixel Qualia camera? Those aren’t all dead products – yet. But Sony, by spewing out products that are clearly part of no greater strategy than “Let’s see what sticks” has eroded the value of their brand and the trust that customers should be able to put in it.

Bring Back the Robots
Except for the robots! While I’ll rail all day about how Sony has overwhelmed us with pointless or half-baked products, I have to admit: I miss the robots. I miss the strange little contraptions, the oh-so-Japanese experiments that clearly have no place in the greater company strategy, but exist only to show off the prowess of Sony’s engineers.

Is the Sony Rolly absolutely silly and overpriced? Of course it is. But if Sony were selling just a couple of dozen products that really nailed it, the Rolly would stop serving as an all-too-fitting icon of Sony’s direction-less and instead take its place as a whirring, cooing, flashing reminder that Sony plays in the future.

Really, though: robot dogs! How are we supposed to believe in Sony if they don’t believe in Aibo!

Make the Best
Once upon time, you bought Sony because “Sony” actually meant “the best”. It’s that reputation of quality that Sony’s largely coasted on (and ridden roughshod over) for the last decade. Sony simply needs to make the best gadgets again.

Take its TVs for example, a core product where Sony is a brand that immediately comes to mind: The Bravia XBR8 is quite possibly the best LCD television ever created. Sony stopped making it last year. The products that followed it, the XBR9 and XBR10, are actually inferior products, despite costing just as much. We actually expected the XBR8 to spawn many better and less expensive TVs, not the opposite. That’s the death of the Sony brand. If Sony means nothing else, it should mean the best gadgetry you can buy. The XBR11 needs to be the greatest LCD TV ever made.

Make Us Believe
Sony is lost. Too entranced by their own mythos to make the hard decisions. Too ready to listen to the Madison Avenue hucksters who convince them that “make.believe” means anything at all.

But we believe in Sony. Even their worst products, however feebly designed, retain the air of quality. (We’re ignoring a few exploding batteries here and there as the travails of any massive company.)

We believe in a Sony that can practice restraint, that can encourage its engineers to dream and innovate, but also can understand that not every crazy accomplishment needs to be validated by becoming a product for sale.

More than anything, we believe that Sony can stop being so prideful, desperate to be acknowledged as the world’s leading electronics company. We believe that the company of Ibuku and Morita can stop telling us they’re the best, and do what they were formed to do:

Prove it.

It’s no secret that publishers absolutely loathe the used games market, as it takes money out of their pockets. The problem? It’s perfectly legal to buy and sell used games. So now we’re seeing more and more publishers do shady stuff like include one-time-use codes in retail packaging that leaves used game buyers without the full experience. This is the most extreme case of this practice yet.

It’s all perfectly legal, I’m sure, but it’s shady as hell and a pretty dick move. But hey, It’s OK! Sony has public good will to spare! [IGN via Consumerist]

• Handheld games are now 25 per cent of the whole gaming market, up from 12 per cent before the iPhone/iPod touch phenomenon.

• During the last three quarters, all handheld game developers are writing for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch.

No wonder why Nintendo’s President not a fan of the iPad. [Electronista]

Educated guesser of component prices iSuppli had deduced that Sony was finally eking out a little bit of profit on every PS3 Slim they sold, thanks to lower costs, but apparently, not the case! They’re hoping to cut production costs by 15 per cent by March 2011. Hey, at least PS3 sales were up 44 per cent. On the other hand, no one’s buying the PSP Go. Sony cut their sales estimates by third for the year.

Sony did actually make money this quarter – the first time in a year – but it was by essentially ravaging the company to cut over $US3 billion in costs: A fifth of its plants are gone, along with 20,000 jobs. [WSJ]

It most definitely takes longer than two minutes to take apart a PSP Go and figure out how to piece it back together, but this neat stop-motion video makes it look like it’s a quick and easy task.

I wish every gadget teardown were done like this. Sound effects and all. [Engadget]

According to Ars, the V-Screen uses an old trick, popular with flight sim devotees, whereby a fresnel lens – at a size slightly larger than the device’s screen – is placed a short distance away from the display. This magnifies the image a bit, and more importantly, adds a sense of depth. For 3D games where depth is important, like racing games and FPSes, the effect is apparently “more compelling than it sounds on paper”, to the point that “it’s going to be hard to back playing the games on a standard screen.”

There’s no doubt that this is a faux-3D setup, but it’s also fairly cheap – $US40, to be exact, which might not buy you honest 3D, but it’ll buy you the sensation. Like a Fleshlight, for your eyes! Yes. [ArsTechnica]

I’m not talking about obvious screw-ups like Microsoft whitewashing their Polish advertising campaign (which they apologised for), or Intel’s obviously unfortunate – but probably accidental – Core 2 Duo campaign. I’m talking about ads that never got pulled, never prompted an apology, and that, to most people, probably seem harmless. Who, dear readers, will be the 1949 GE of 2060? And for what? Racism? Sexism? Some as-of-yet-unnoticed -ism? Am I oversimplifying what constitutes progress? Difficult questions!

More to the point, will my kids watch these PSP ads in history class, come home, and ask me why I was such a terrible human, back in 2009?

‘Cause I’m thinking yes. Post your best guesses in the comments, about, you know, the future. [CopyRanter]

Actually, I think I’ll also be reading some Iron Man comics on the new PSP Comic reader. It seriously is a pretty cool way of reading comics. If you haven’t already tried it, there are 14 free comics available on the Playstation Store which will let you whet your appetite for the service. Oh, and the reader is free too.

Anybody else spending the last weekend before Christmas with gadgets? Remember, they’re your other family, so don’t forget to give them the love and affection they deserve…

As far as digital comic readers go, it’s pretty impressive. The Store has launched with 400 comics, with each comic costing anywhere between $1.75 and $2.45. There are also a heap of free comics available to download to get you started.

Comics are purchased through the Playstation Store on the PSP itself, or via the MediaGo PC Suite and sideloaded onto your device.

The comics themselves come from Marvel, IDW, Rebellion and Disney, with a combination of both old and new issues available.

I don’t know about you, but I’m actually really excited by this. I’ve been a bit disappointed with the PSP’s games offering recently – especially compared to the raft of great, cheap games available for the iPhone – but being able to read comics this way is a nice new feature I think I’ll really enjoy.

[Playstation]