Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey will probably forever be known to gamers as the guy who said Sony would rip Blu-ray out of the PS3 in order to cut down its price tag. I still don't think that's gonna happen, and so does Sony, apparently. Speaking to Business Insider, Sony execs answered a few questions about the PS3 as well as the PSP, not least of which is the matter of the non-Blu-ray PS3.

Let's kick off today with a release for PSP homebrew devs. This one is the latest release of Nanodesktop from pegasus2000. The SDK has a lot of new changes, including added support for Linux, a new guide, new VOIP libraries and a lot of other things that just goes over my non-dev brain, so check out the complete changelog in the full article.

Visit: QJ.NET PSP Development Forums

Nanodesktop (previous version here) is updated once again with several additions such as support of TrueType font and compression/decompression of zip files. If you're a PSP homebrew developer you should check out pegasus2000's Nanodesktop. The changelog in the full article.


Download: Nanodesktop 0.3.4
Visit: QJ PSP Development Forums

Among the Sony PSP's list of functions, one that we were beginning to wonder about was its Voice over IP feature (VoIP), given it hasn't really been getting any attention...until now. We have just picked up news that the California-based VoIP provider Jajah Inc. will now be offering VoIP services for the Sony PSP.

PSP owners who want to take advantage of the offer will first have to be registered members at Jajah's home site. Once this is done, users are instructed to log in at Jajah's mobile link using their PSP via its web browser and WiFi connection.

The service also carries an address book feature for your contacts - calling your friends is just a matter of clicking on the appropriate link on the web browser. And if you fancy getting the most out of this new service, you may want to get your friends to join, as Jajah advertised that calls between two registered members are free.

Full registration details should be available at Jajah's home site (follow the Via link below), along with phone rate details (depending on your region). Owners of other consoles may want to keep an eye out for further announcements - Jajah has noted that it is working on VoIP compatibility for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii consoles.

---

Update: The Jajah site has just been updated with a new video showing how the VoIP service works with the PSP. Here's the YouTube video uploaded by netzkobold.

You might think I've gone bonkers. But bear with me here, I'm not kidding. A lucky find by my friend MaTiAz seems to point towards some form of VoIP functionality in upcoming firmwares. This reference to Skype is hidden in the decrypted version of vshmain.prx from Firmware 3.10, basically the latest firmware if you don't count 3.11. Nobody has yet checked the presence of its reference in the latest firmware (3.11) but it's most probably there since not much has changed between the two firmwares.

Anyways, I did get a look at the decrypted version of the prx and as expected, this string pointing to a non-existing prx was present. To save you guys the hassle of having to do it yourselves, I've taken a screenshot which shows the same. If you're interested in finding it yourself, the reference is present as a string at offset 0x000344C4 in the decrypted vshmain.prx.

Checking the dump, there was no actual PRX by that name which means that the actual functionality is still being worked upon at this stage. And I don't think anyone's bluffing either. There have already been cases of Camera, GPS, and POPS PRXes being in the firmware long before the functionality was opened up. In the case of Camera and GPS, references can be found as far back as Firmware 2.70. POPS references were found in Firmware 2.80 dumps.

While this is all good to hear, the question begs to be asked - "What happens to the Sony Mylo?" You know, the PSP's sibling which came out a while ago with features like VoIP and Google Talk support. Is Sony thinking of burying the Mylo and making the PSP into "a lot more than a handheld" whose main functionality until now has been gaming? After all, the Mylo never quite took off in the same manner as the PSP, which itself has been lagging far behind the DS. We don't have any figures to back us here, but the Mylo was, in my opinion, a complete failure.

So while killing off the Mylo might not sound so good, it's probably a good move by Sony to move over a lot of its functionality to the PSP which still has a firm ground to stand on with over a few million users. It's all speculation since Sony hasn't announced anything yet, but then again, would you expect an official announcement from Sony about this?

The hardware in the PSP is good enough to handle the extra additions and the feature set of the Mylo was pretty much a subset of what you found on the PSP, plus a few additions. As for the firmware features, my opinion is that you should see some of the Skype functionality coming out in Firmware 3.50 or thereabouts. This would give Sony at least a couple of months to fine-tune everything and integrate it with the rest of the stuff already there. Stay tuned, we will have the latest on this as soon as we know more! A big thanks to MaTiAz for telling me about this find!