2008 30
Why FON’s partnership with Sony PSP is good for Foneros
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Following last week’s announcement of FON’s partnership with Sony PSP we received a few negative comments from Foneros wondering why we would give PSP users access to FON’s network, even if they don’t share their connections like Foneros do. The reason is simple: this partnership helps us grow the network and promote FON, which ultimately is extremely positive for Foneros.
How does Sony PSP help FON? Simple, Sony is marketing FON to over 10 million PSP users. They find out about FON, understand how practical it is for them, learn how to enjoy it, and join FON. Sony is telling them what we already know: that FON is good. Sony will promote La Fonera and encourage PSP users to buy one to get full access to FON Spots. The announcement has already shown significant impact on Fonera sales in Japan, and it has been only a week.
PSP owners who will connect to FON Spots thanks to this partnership won’t have full access to the Internet nor will they be able to play online games, unless they become Foneros. With this deal they can only access the official PSP site and download custom themes, wallpapers, special characters only available at FON Spots (this only accounts for extremely minimal traffic). What a PSP owner wants to do online is to play online games, and for that he will need to buy a Fonera and share his Internet connection as any other Fonero.
The majority of the Foneros understand that this is great and we haven’t received a single complaint from our fellow Japaneses Foneros, quite the opposite. So far this agreement is only for Japan, but we’re working to extend it to other countries. It helps growing the network of FON Spots and we are sure that the success of the deal in terms of FON exposure, new Foneros and new FON Spots will be replicated in every country.
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steven on August 30, 2008 ·
Hi,
the deal spoke about HD Video content for the Playstation 3 (where the PSP is some kind of remote control tool) and that doesn’t sound like low traffic to me?
Also due to the whitelisting the Fonspot owners won’t see any traffic in their logging and can not tell if their fonspot is generating much or not traffic at al…
I’ve created a small tool that can give them an indication about traffic/connections spent on their fonera at status.fonera.be even when there is no traffic mentioned at MyFon due to the whitelisting.
Also my neighbour had to downgrade his Fonera to WEP because a PSP can only chose WPA-PSK while La Fonera required WPA-PSK/TKIP…. TKIP was not possible on La Fonera.
Also a PSP browser has no FLASH player and thus can not benefit the 15 free minutes a day on any fonspot
There is no “iFON” for the PSP so they need to authenticate by browser each time and “virtual keyboard” which is quite a hassle hence the PSP has no touchscreen like the iPhone…
Btw how was the SOny Mylo & Fonera bundle going along in the last year? https://english.martinvarsavsky.net/fon/mylo-and-fon.html
haven’t heard much about this deal as well?
There aren’t 10mio Mylo users probably…. but the PSP is also reasonably OLD…and has practically no outstanding games on it. Currently Sony is trying a lot of things to get it sold like adding a GPS addon.
In January 2008 Sony added “skype” functionality to the PSP
although sony didn’t allow it on the “old” thicker PSP devices to skype because it only had 32mbyte of RAM while the newer had 64mbyte … (homebrewn versions exist with skype)…also one has to buy a “headset” hence the sony PSP doesn’t come with build in mike
in order to get skype access these PSP owners will have to become full foneros; hence skype is not whitelisted…