Sony Talkman

Price: U.S $99.99 or 56.50 GBP

Traveling and meeting people from all around the globe sure is fun, but may have its drawbacks when you're not speaking the language. To ease this barrier, innovation comes via Sony which took ScanSoft's speech recognition software and created both an universal language interpreter and trainer for English and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarine) and Korean. The cool thing is that you can go either way with Talk and Game mode, English > Japanese, Japanese > English, Korean > Chinese, etc. Released just recently, we now found some time to dedicate ourselves to this unique PSP title and wrote a comprehensive hands-on review for you, which can be found below. Talkman ships for just US$ 99.99, including a stylish USB microphone and will turn your PSP into a translation and learning machine, wrapped in a fun, game-like presentation! An US release is not in sight at the moment (and sure would require serious adjustments), but the Japanese version works perfectly for all who speak one of the four featured languages, as you can select your favorite tongue (and screen text) at any time. One of our game industry friends from Germany claims he is currently working on some localization work for the European version of the software, which he says should feature all common languages spoken on the Old Continent (French, German, Spanish, Italian etc.) We know no date and no formal announcement on this has been made by Sony of Europe so far.