Qriocity To Give Sony's PSP Unlimited Music

Tweet

An interesting twist, folks, as Sony starts to lay the groundwork for making their PSP the ultimate iPod killer by sheer force of utility. Seems that with the release of Qriocity out in Europe, a new software upgrade will turn the PSP into perhaps the ultimate in portable music solutions as well.

You’ve read here a couple times about Qriocity, the media streaming portal that will allow access to all sorts of movies, but it’ll also pack a nice musical punch as well. But the part that means something new to us is the annoucement of PSP’s upcoming software update, version 6.35.

Version 6.35 will prepare the PSP to become part of Sony’s new “Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity” service. Yes, I know that may well be one of if not the most godawful name for a service ever, which is why it’s in quotes.

And what this mouthful of a service will do is act a lot like Zune, the new Napster (I remember when Napster was for free music), Rhapsody, and the others which will in turn allow users to stream all the music they want as part of a cloud service. The update to the PSP will allow it to get in on the streaming when Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity gets launching. And that really is a horrible title.

Like I said, though, this may be a sock in the gut for iPod that gets fence sitters moving to Camp PSP. I mean, reasonably–the iPod plays music first, games second. Yes, I too enjoy Angry Birds on my iPod Touch, as well as the great amount of stuff in the App Store. But even I know that iPod can’t possibly compete with the dedicated PSP in terms of gaming–it’s like putting the DSi against the Wii. But with this extra edge in music streaming, will more people move to PSP? Marcus would be happy…but will anyone else?