PSP vs iPod
With Sony's PSP set to debut in North America in about a month, some reporters are trying to pit it against Apple's iPod in some imaginary battle for the hearts and minds of consumers. It's foolish and rather shortsighted, I believe, and not really understanding what the PSP does and does not do.
The PSP's primary role for the first few million people who buy it will be as a handheld gaming system. It will also make a decent way to watch movies portably. But it's going to take a while for that to catch on. And it's certainly not without its drawbacks -- the screen is quite small. And sure, it has everything you need to play music on it, assuming you don't mind the limited capacity afforded by the Memory Stick Pro Duo flash storage. The big media the PSP uses -- the UMD discs that store games and movies -- is read-only.
Edit: Remy points out that the PSP will mount the Memory Stick card on any Mac or PC like a mass storage device, so you can just click and drag music and other files to the card straight from your desktop.
Which means you're limited in how much you can store to the capacity of your Memory Stick Duo card. Sure, you can get a Pro Duo card in capacities up to 1GB, but that's way, way short of the storage capacity of an iPod mini, or even a Network Walkman, if you're some sort of Sony loyalist.