The pre-release sample of the new hardware arrived withan unreleased firmware revision: 5.70. This may or may not be thesystem software that ships with the retail unit coming on 1st October.5.70 does feature a number of changes over the current 5.51 operatingsystem.
Not surprisingly, it’s the Settings area of the XMB that gets the lion’s share of the changes:
Network Update is now listed as System Update, but, curiously, has the same options.
Video Settings obviously doesn’t have the first four UMD-related toggles.
System Settings now has a “Your Birth Date” option (second from top),and a “Display Panel Close Option” toggle, which allows you to set itto either “Standard” (goes to a clock graphic) or “Enter Sleep Mode”.Also “Battery Information” seems to be gone, as do UMD-related options,but there’s a “Format System Storage” option in addition to the usualMemory Stick format option.
Power Save Settings loses the “Backlight Auto-Adjust” option for some reason.
There’s a new “Bluetooth Device Settings” entry, which consists of atoggle for switching Bluetooth on and off and a “Manage BluetoothDevices” entry.
Hooking up the PSPgo to a Mac via USB, we find that the total availablestorage available to the user is 14.74GB, formatted in the FAT32configuration (hence introducing a 4GB file-size limit).
Sony has opted out of using a conventional USB cable format on thenew handheld. The PSPgo itself uses a wider, thinner connector for theconsole, terminating in the standard USB connector. So, similar to theiPhone and iPod Touch, it’s proprietary cable time. It also appears asthough Sony has moved away from the old AV port that debuted on thePSP-2000 – there’s a common-or-garden 3.5mm stereo jack connection forheadphones only, not the more traditional extended interface with itssupport for external remotes and the like.