Now this is probably the biggest news for the PSP community in a while! The Noobz have released Furikup, their own PSP Phone software.

Sony has announced a phone functionality for PSP, but, as the Noobz state, there are a few flaws:

• It’s not yet clear how much it will cost to obtain the software, to subscribe to the service, and to make calls
• It’s not likely to be available in all countries
• It’s rumoured to only run on the PSP Slim - what about all those loyal early-adopters? :(
• It will probably only support a limited subset of possible voice platforms - e.g. maybe just Skype, which is notoriously bad at interoperating with other networks.

Furikup’s best features:

• It’s free software - in both the beer, and speech senses.
• You can use it anywhere in the world, subject to signing-up to a suitable local SIP-based voice-over-IP provider and being near a usable wifi access point. In many countries, you can find those for free or nearly-free - e.g. with SIPGate, in the UK, you can call to your PSP from any standard phone (landline or cellphone) for just the standard local call cost, and from PSP to another SIP phone (another PSP or a PC) for free.
• It runs on both slim and fat PSPs.
• It uses open standards, for maximum compatibility with other phone systems.
• You can use a Go!Cam (Chotto Shot), Talkman microphone, or SOCOM-style headset for audio input. (And even if you don’t have any of those, you can still send audio from a WAV file in a pinch).

It’s still pretty much beta software - the audio quality needs some work (but it is usable), the UI isn’t very pretty, and video calls aren’t working (yet!). But it works, and it’s a nice demo of what is possible.

And please, be sure to read the readme.html before using.

Download from N00bz!