How do you pronounce that? Rooooooom?

A lot of PSP news this week, and hardly any of it applicable to Aussies, sadly. Here's one interesting snippet that will no doubt apply to every PSP owner under the sun, though: Sony have announced a new social networking application for the PSP. It sounds much like a kind of portable Playstation Home-lite.

Since they haven't been able to come up with anything better than "motion controller" for the ping-pong wand, I had kind of despaired of Sony's naming abilities, but you have to admit, "PSP Room" is pretty cute.

Actually as you can see from the logo it's PSP R∞m, but as that character is almost certain to break nearly everything that tries to use it, let's just stick to the normal alphabet for now!

With a much more cartoony style than Home's more mature look, Room provides many of the same services: a customised avatar and personal virtual space, which you can invite other users to visit, hosting your own chat parties. Since you pretty much need to be in the same, um, room, to use the PSP's Ad Hoc wireless settings, Infrastructure connectivity is virtually guaranteed.


Presumably there is also the potential for developers to add content like special items for your avatar and room, or host events. PSP Room will arrive on your XMB via a firmware update sometime over Summer.