Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Personal entertainment devices

Jan 14, 2008 19:06 pm / Add a comment

Here’s my family’s recent expe­ri­ence with per­sonal enter­tain­ment devices:

About 2 years ago, I thought Nin­tendo DS was a run away win­ner in per­sonal game device because it seemed to be the per­fect fit to the con­cept of trans­for­ma­tion econ­omy which was my favorite eco­nomic con­cept at that time. (It still is.) It was fun, and by play­ing some of their games, such as Eng­lish lessons, or brain train­ing, one could become smarter. As a mother I didn’t mind buy­ing my kids DS. I would have said no to Sony PSP if my kids asked for it, because in my eyes, it didn’t have any edu­ca­tional potential.

Today, my 9 year-old and 13 year-old both own PSP. My hus­band bought the device for kids because he fell in love with it. I’m not crazy about kids play­ing with it, since I didn’t think their soft­wares have noth­ing that would improve the kids’ minds. But I am impressed with it’s poten­tial since with it’s con­nec­tiv­ity with web is pretty good, and with it’s var­i­ous func­tions, if one wanted enter­tain­ment, well, it’s a good device for that. The kids mainly play games on it now, but my hus­band bor­rows it to lis­ten to inter­net radio pro­grams, down­load movies and TV shows to watch, occa­sion­ally watch one seg. One thing that sur­prised us dur­ing the past hol­i­days is that when my 13 year-old’s friends came over, all 3 of them owned PSP.

I thought, wow! PSP is win­ning over DS within Japan! Although both PSP and DS has inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity poten­tials, PSP makes that part seem more attrac­tive to the users, catch­ing some­one like my hus­band who would pro­ceed to buy one for all his kids.

But today, some­thing inter­est­ing hap­pened. Our 20 year-old son who’s a col­lege stu­dent said he wanted a PSP too. I was sure my hus­band would have told him, buy it with your own work money. But instead, he said yes. (Sur­prise!) Then when he explained to the 20 year-old that PSP only has 4 GB mem­ory com­pared to 40 GB of iPod, our son imme­di­ately lost inter­est in PSP. 4GB would only be the same what’s in the iPod Nano he now owned. Some­how, the 20 year-old suc­ceeded in con­vinc­ing his father to buy him an iPod with 40GB. This thing costs 25% more than the PSP. My son uses cell phone for e-mails, HP PC for e-mails, SNS, edit­ing music, video, watch­ing the web enter­tain­ment stuff, etc. With per­sonal enter­tain­ment device, he was only inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to music and watch­ing his pas­sion: dance. Any­thing else was not important.

Come to think of it, for a per­sonal enter­tain­ment device, I would not give up my 40GB iPod for a PSP either, because as much as I use videos and pho­tographs for my work, my per­sonal enter­tain­ment is focused on lis­ten­ing to music, read­ing books, writ­ing short essays. Of all the per­sonal enter­tain­ment devices that I know of, only part that works for me is han­dling the music I lis­ten to. Lis­ten­ing to music enhances my phys­i­cal entertainment/fitness activ­i­ties too.

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