My PlayStation Portable gets powered on about every four weeks, on average. With little time to game, even less for my second-string portable, it doesn't get much love at Casa de McWhertor. However, following the Remote Play update to the PLAYSTATION 3 firmware, I became curious about how well it worked. It was time dust off my PSP and test it out. That means giving the PSP its monthly battery charge, remembering that I still haven't finished Exit, and going through the firmware update motions.

Internet-based Remote Play was added weeks ago when the PS3 was updated to version 1.80, previously network-only—more of a novelty than anything else. It's rare that one would find oneself walking around the house, PSP in hand streaming content from a not-too distant PS3.

Following last week's firmware update for the PSP to version 3.50, which now allows for Remote Play streaming over the internet, Remote Play started to be somewhat useful. Now, if the uncommon owner of both a PSP and a PS3 decides that he or she would like to access the content on his or her home console from anywhere in the world, he or she has that option.

Merely connecting to my wireless connection then to my PS3 about 8 feet away wasn't quite driving home the impact of using this new connectivity, so I made a rare trip outside in daylight.

Booking down to the local free wi-fi featured coffee house, Silverlake Coffee, I hopped on their network, signed in to my PlayStation Network account and began streaming MP3s from my miles-away home console. Keep in mind, however, that I did have to leave my PS3 running, in Remote Play mode and signed in to the PlayStation Network, essentially idling for reasons that could largely be replaced by my iPod.

But it worked. And I thought "This is cool. I can actually see myself using this at some point. This really IS the Walkman of the 21st century!" Exorcising the demon Ken Kutaragi from my brain, I decided to see (and listen) how well the PSP performed at emulating the PS3 interface. The PSP display, during Remote Play, looks exactly like the PS3 Cross Media Bar as it too is streamed to the portable. You'll see PS3 game demos, which you (obviously) can't play, the PlayStation Store, which you can navigate and kick off demo or trailer downloads, as well as your stored music, video and photos.

The streaming of audio performed admirably, but stuttered a bit when the free wi-fi connection dropped to 66% strength. Even then, it held up like a champ. Video on the other hand, suffered slightly from streaming over the internet to the PSP. You'll notice a slight delay when navigating the streamed PS3 XMB, a delay which you can configure to your preferences, and this delay can cause odd video behavior. Navigate to a video and select it too quickly and you'll jump to a random spot in the clip (Reader Cartman86 reminds me that the PS3 remembers at what time you stopped a video and jumps-to that time on reviewing). Video looked on par with medium quality streamed video on the Web when my connection was set to the lowest quality settings (256kb).

Remote Play over the PSP allows for five levels of interface delay and streaming quality each. Setting each of these to optimal levels allowed for higher fidelity audio and video streams, but, as expected, increased skipped frames and stuttering music playback. It all depends on your signal, but the default settings seem to work quite well.

While I don't see myself using Remote Play over the internet often, when the PS3 allows for Wake On Lan support in a future firmware upgrade, I expect I'll be using my PS3 to store more non-gaming content... and not just for tech demos. Everyone that witnessed demonstrations of Remote Play was very impressed. This is a very gee-whiz inducing feature and one that I hope Sony improves upon over the next few years.

Any questions? I'll do my best to answer in the comments. Michael McWhertor