Shop Ship Wise - Your Guide For Shopping Online

Sony’s latest range of NW-E MP3 players appeared on the company’s New Zealand site today in a range of colors. The line features the NWZ-E435, NWZ-E436 and NWZ-E438, which will come in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB, respectively. All models include a 2″ QVGA TFT LCD display, FM tuner, and support MP3 (obviously), WMA, AAC, and linear PCM codec support. No pricing just yet, but they’re rumored to be hitting the channel within the next month or so. [Sony Insider]

Original post by Jack Loftus

Sony took the radical step of renaming their “Mylo Personal Communicator” the “Mylo Internet Device.” Though it’s unlikely to affect the five of you that actually bought a Mylo, you have to wonder if it’s a last ditch effort to generate interest in a product that didn’t exactly set the gadget world on fire. [Pocketables via Gadgetell]

Original post by Adrian Covert

The folks at the Criterion Collection know a thing or two about movies. They restore classic films for release on DVD and, starting later this year, Blu-ray. So when they set up their screening rooms, you’d expect them to have some crazy $1,000 Blu-ray player, right? Nope. The Criterion Collection people rock a Playstation 3 for use as their reference Blu-ray player. If you needed further proof that the PS3 is the best Blu-ray player out there, now you have it. [CNET]

Original post by Adam Frucci

One of the topics discussed at our roundtable with Sony at E3 (besides their dislike for paying for features and their 20/20 hindsight as to what went wrong with the PS3’s development) was piracy. Piracy was half the reason SCEA’s Jack Tretton gave to why the PSP is not living up to its promise as a powerhouse portable console, with the other half being the straight-shooting admission that PSP owners didn’t want to pay for ports of PS2 games. So what can you loyal fans do when developers aren’t putting out the type of content worth playing? Homebrew, the magical world of quasi-legal third-party PSP software including web apps, radio apps, Super Nintendo/NES emulators and ripped PS1 games. I’m going to show you how to get your PSP to do all this and more.

There are dozens of guides online that show you how to get custom firmware onto your PSP in as many different ways. This is the method I found to be the easiest, combining tips from sites like PSP Slim Hacks and Code Retard. Note that this is customized for the PSP Slim, which is the only PSP you can go out to stores and buy, but most of these steps will be the same for the older PSP. I started the process with a PSP running 3.71 firmware, but it should much the same on other versions.

1) Buy a PSP MAX Power TOOL SLIM battery. Trust me. Unless you have a friend who already hacked their PSP and has a service mode battery of their own, this is the easiest solution. There are ways of modifying your current battery to enable service mode on your PSP, but the time spent doing that is much better spent doing ANYTHING else. Buy this for $25 and wait for it to come in the mail.

2) Make sure you have at least a 256MB Memory Stick and a USB to miniUSB cable to connect your PSP to your computer running a version of Windows XP. I tried this on Vista but it kept erroring out on various parts of the process.

3) Charge your current (normal) battery as well as the MAX Power to full.

4) Download this file here, as linked to from this guide here. Extract the file to your desktop (remember, Windows XP machine).

5) Connect your PSP to your computer via the USB cable and setting it in “USB mode”. Use the standard battery for this. If you have any important files on your memory card, back that up to a folder on your computer first.

6) Run the “START.exe” file from the package you extracted. Follow the instructions there. Once this is done, you’ll have what’s called a “Magic Memory Card”, which is used to replace the standard firmware with a customized one. You’ll have to pop your memory card in and out as the program tells you during the process. Follow the instructions until it tells you that you’re done, then disconnect your PSP and turn it off.

7) Take out your normal battery, but don’t put in your MAX Power battery just yet. Hold the L button (the left shoulder button) while inserting in the MAX Power battery. Make sure it’s secure and won’t fall out fall out while you’re putting the battery cover back on.

Once the PSP is on (you might have to flip the power toggle) you may see a black screen with white text, or you may see nothing at all—I saw a completely blank screen for some reason. Either way, the power light on your PSP should be green to show that the unit’s powered on. To install the firmware, press the X button. You should see the Memory Stick light on the left of your PSP flash with activity. When this is done, the PSP will shut itself off. Congrats! Now you have version 3.71 m33. But you’re not done.

9) To upgrade this to version 4.01 (the latest hacked release as of this writing), download these files. First, the official 4.01 firmware. Then, the hacked 4.01 m33 and also 4.01 m33-2. That not a typo, by the way: Those file names are actually backwards and m33 is actually m33-2. Keep this in mind.

10) Extract all 3 files into their own directories. The 401-m332 folder (which should actually be the m33 update and not the m33-2 update) should have a folder called UPDATE under it. The Now, place the 401.PBP file (the official 4.01 firmware file) into the 401-m33 UPDATE. All this is going on on your PC’s hard drive, not the PSP.

11) Then connect your PSP to your PC again (put the normal battery back), enable USB mode and copy the entire UPDATE folder from your PC onto /PSP/GAME/ onto your PSP’s memory card.

12) On your PSP, exit USB mode, go to the Game and then Memory Stick, and run the PSP Update. Follow the instructions on screen, and you should have a PSP running 4.01 m33.

13) Now, connect your PSP to your computer using USB mode, delete the UPDATE folder under /PSP/GAME from your PSP, and copy over the UPDATE folder that belongs to the 401m33-2 file from your PC onto the PSP. Then go to the Game section and run this update on your PSP. You don’t need the official 4.01 firmware in your UPDATE folder for this. Woohoo, you’re finished.

Are you ready to get some homebrew going? Hit up PSP Hacks for a big list of applications you can run, including web apps, radio apps, Sudoku and even emulators. For obvious reasons, we’re not going to link you to actual ROMs to run on an SNES emulator, but you can find those in the usual places you get ROMs. There are several SNES emulators to choose from, but this SNES emulator runs particularly well on the PSP, lending itself to old school gaming on the go.

Although a side effect of homebrew is that you can run pirated PSP games on your PSP, that’s being pretty naughty and isn’t something we encourage. The fact that a lot of people are doing this is contributing to (according to Sony) the lack of good games for the platform, which hurts everybody. Try not do to this.

What you can do is rip your old PS1 games and play THOSE on your PSP without waiting for an official release and having to pay Sony again for something you already own. Another idea when you’re going on vacation is to get a 16GB Memory Stick and load all the PSP games you own onto it so you don’t have to carry around so many UMDs. In order to rip PS1 games, you’ll need a program like ISOBuster (there are others as well) that can take your disc and create an “image” of it on your hard drive, which is just a file representing the contents of the CD. You then plug those files into a program called PSX eBoot Creator to make it suitable for your PSP. The file and instructions on how to use it can be found here. You don’t need a separate emulator once you have the eBoot file, but you do need plenty of space on your Memory Stick (1GB is probably only enough to hold a couple small games or one large one).

Thanks: We wanted to thank all the hard work that the PSP community—which includes PSP Slim Hacks and Code Retard which we got much help installing this from.

Did you like this How To tutorial? The point was to give you the easiest path from start to finish, even if it required you to spend money on purchasing something. Your time is valuable, which means you don’t want to spend hours solving something yourself when it can easily be bypassed with a few dollars. What do you want to see a How To on? Drop us a note at tips@gizmodo.com with the subject “How To Suggestion”.

Original post by Jason Chen

From September, T-Mobile customers will be able to get hold of Sony Ericsson’s TM506 cellphone: which is also T-Mobile’s first HSDPA handset. The two-megabyte flip-phone is a pretty standard tri-band GSM, with dual-band UMTS/HSDPA for 3G connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0 and a 2-megapixel camera. Doesn’t look like you can do video calling, but video messaging is enabled and it has aGPS on-board. It’ll be available from September 3, for an as-yet-unknown price, in a green and black color scheme. [BGR and IntoMobile]

Original post by Kit Eaton

Want to get in on the closed beta for Sony’s once-upon-a-time hotly anticipated PlayStation Home? To throw your name into the hat, just download the PlayStation Home theme that’ll be added to the store later today. That’s it. Your level of activity is apparently one of the criteria they’ll be looking at—it’s implied the more hardcore you are, the better your chances, though they might wanna see how nubbie nubs like it too. [PlayStation Blog]

Original post by matt buchanan

JD Power and Associates just released the results of its latest camera survey, culling the responses of over 8,000 digital camera buyers between April of 2007 and March of 2008. They split the categories into DSLRs, Point and Shoots, Premium Point and Shoots, and Ultra Slims. Hit the jump to see the list of winners.

DSLR:
(two-way tie)
-Canon EOS Digital SLR
-Nikon D Series

Point and shoot:
-Fujifilm Finepix S Series

Premium Point and Shoot:
(two-way tie)
-Canon PowerShot G Series
-Lumix (Panasonic) DMC-TZ Series

Ultra Slim:
-Sony Cyber-Shot T Series

Head on over to Hot Hardware to see the rest of the survey results in detail and feel free to use the comments to let us know how correct/insane these results are. [Hot Hardware]

Original post by Adam Frucci

Sony is now recruiting beta testers for PlayStation Home, the virtual world that PS3 users will use to interact with each other—and try to have virtual sex. They will invite 10,000 users from today to August 11, with the beta starting later in the month. The beta will include only a limited number of places, including a Game Venue developed in collaboration with Namco, where you would be able to play Pac-Man, Galaga, and DigDug. All of them look very nice and polished, however:

galleryPost(’betahome’, 6, ”);

The locations include:

• Home Square, the central plaza that gives access to all the places.
where users will be able to customize their house.
• Your apartment.
• Theater, to watch videos and trailers.
• Bowling and Billiards.
• Marketplace.

[Impress AV Watch]

Original post by Jesus Diaz

The PS3 may be having its ups and downs, but one thing is for certain—Sony is loving the Xross Media Bar. They put it in some of their Bravia TVs, the PSP, some Cybershot cameras and now they are planning to integrate the interface into their new Vaio FW series laptops. Naturally, the goal here is to provide synergy between all sorts of devices to create that “digital living room” type experience that is all the rage these days. [Tech Radar]

Original post by Sean Fallon

E3’s over, but that doesn’t mean you’ve seen every bit of information that came out of the event. Oh no. Here’s every single thing that came out of E3, starting with the liveblogs of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. What did Penny Arcade think of the event? Well, they weren’t all too impressed with the big three’s offerings. That might be a little harsh, but yeah, we could see that. Make the jump to decide for yourself.

Microsoft
Nintendo
Sony

Microsoft
How your current themes will look on the Xbox 360
Why Microsoft made a new Xbox Experience
Netflix on Xbox 360!
You can play games directly off the Xbox’s hard drive
Xbox 360 is getting Avatars
Newly colored Xbox 360 controllers

Sony
The Dreamcast IS as strong as the iPhone
Sony knows what went wrong with the PS3’s development
How Sony being cheap hurts the PS3
The PlayStation video store is open
The PS3 80GB model gets a $399 price tag in September
PSN gets a simple sign-on
PS2 gets a LEGO Batman bundle

Nintendo
Hands-on With the Wii MotionPlus
Wii Sports Resort gets a price
The Wii ain’t so cheap
The Wii finally gets a mic

Elsewhere
Rock Band 2’s Instruments look great
EA upgrades its iPhone games
The DS is not as strong as the iPhone
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on iPhone
The official Rock Band 2 track list

Original post by Jason Chen