Sony are refusing to give up on their PSP handheld console despite many insiders thinking that’s exactly what they have done.

With the recent release of the PSP Go doing little if anything to reinvigorate the worrying sales of the console, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sony, after trying it the digital way, would walk away from the PSP and simply focus their attention on the upcoming PSP 2.

Anyway, in a recent interview with industry website MCV, Mark Howsen and David Wilson, the UK sales director and PR boss respectively for Sony, indicated that Sony are not quite ready to walk away from their aging handheld.

It seems now that the priority with the PSP brand is to shift it more into direct competition with the iTunes business model. IE; cheap affordable and essentially throwaway games…

Howsen explained…

“We’re seeing a trend whereby consumers are relatively accepting of the fact that they have to buy high-price hardware but at the same time they expect to pay very little, or sometimes even nothing at all, for software. That’s a real shift in behaviour.”

He added…

“To reinvent the whole PSP model we need to look at handheld in a very different way, in the context in which consumers are now viewing it. We’re trying to reengage consumers with PSP, though that’s not just a challenge for us – it’s a challenge for the whole handheld sector. We are at the point of a major shift in the way that consumers are engaging with the current players in that market.

Photo courtesy of scrapetv.com

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