Wombat Mobile

I got a chance to play around with the 2.0 firmware PSP browser this morning while riding the stationary bike. This is, in itself, a notable feat since I can now absorb my morning infoblitz (news, stocks, blogs) while getting a workout. This also allows be to throw away my plans to jury-rig some sort of laptop-exercise bike harness/suspension mechanism. There's no need to construct a Rube Goldberg machine when the the PSP will do the job.

First impressions:

Entering text is a little tricky at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly. I don't expect to do much more typing now that I have my bookmarks setup. I only plan on using the PSP for passive browsing like Bloglines, scanning news, and checking msgboards.
Scrolling down a webpage was a little confusing. It appears as if pressing the down button jumps down to the next link, and when the link is way down on the page, this makes it very hard to continuously read the text. From the help section, I think you're supposed to press [square]+down to scroll down, but I was still having problems reading large chunks of text that spanned multiple screens. It definitely wasn't as intuitive as my phone's browser.
Initially I was using it like the browser I use on my mobile phone, which doesn't have tabs. This was a bit of a pain because, while my PSP browser cache is set to 512kb, some pages didn't seem to get cached that I had expected, so pushing the shoulder buttons to go back and forward between pages was a slow process.

Luckily, the PSP browser does have tabs and you can get around this problem by holding down the X button and opening the link in a new tab. Once I figured out the tabs (and switching between them using [square]+shoulder buttons), this was a breeze. I still haven't figured out the shortcut keys to close a tab, though. :(
That's all I have for now, the speed and rendering quality were great, I can definitely see the PSP becoming an integral part of my morning exercise/infoblitz routine.

So while the PSP definitely passed the stationary bike test, tonight I'll see how it stacks up against the tried-and-true "laptop on the couch tv-watching" evening ritual.