Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Notepad/Portable Office Documents in PSP

The lack of notepad and office capability of the PSP is admittedly the weak point of its PDA possibilities. However, this is mostly due to the lack of any sort of quick text-entry device. Mac users can easily export PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents to PDF and then convert to JPEG for viewing through the photo capabilities of the PSP (if you're on Windows or Linux, you can do the same with Adobe Acrobat or GhostScript, or use the free OpenOffice to open the documents and then generate your PDF). Word documents can be converted to plain text files that are readable by the browser.

Unfortunately, none of these solutions allows you to edit your documents while you are on the go. If you have Internet access and a PSP with Version 2.0 firmware, however, you will find that you can use your PSP to edit most of the popular types of online blogs, wikis, and other editable sites, so if you need to jot down some notes, why not log in to your blogging platform of choice (I use WordPress) via the PSP and save your notes as drafts on the site? You can access these later and flesh out your hastily scrawled notes that you banged out on the PSP's primitive text-entry system. If you want, you can easily configure such software to allow you to view and edit things, but keep the rest of the world from seeing anything.

If you are running Version 1.5 of the firmware, there is a homebrew solution called "Notepad for the PSP"

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