Portable media player that plays games. (Review, not preview.)

Right out of the box, you have to figure something out about the PSP. For $249, including headphones, case, demo disc, a movie and a remote, Sony are selling the PSP at a loss. But they have to - the PSP is aiming to take down two bastions of technology. They've taken aim at the iPod and the Nintendo DS.

The PSP has definite "X" Factor. I was lusting after one for months, and seeing it on the news only strengthened my desire. But I waited. A few days after the launch, we went down to BestBuy to see if they had any I could look at. As soon as I'd spent 5 minutes hands-on, the deal was sealed.

Design
The design of the PSP is pretty straightforward. An analogue "thumbstick" and a set of directional buttons are on the left, the screen is in the middle, and the usual 4 Playstation type buttons are on the right. Along the bottom of the screen there are buttons for home, select, start, screen and audio. Along the top of the unit are the two shoulder buttons, in this case made of transparent plastic.
The UMD drive is centred on the back of the machine and pops open easily enough to allow discs to be inserted and removed. The screen is a glossy plastic which is going to be a problem if you're using the PSP with any kind of light behind you.

Screen
The screen is the centrepiece of the PSP, obviously. The colours are vibrant, and despite the seemingly low resolution of the specs, once you see it in the flesh, the resolution seems a lot higher than it really is. There is evidence of a relatively slow refresh rate on some movie clips - ghosting is really obvious on the trailer for "Stealth" that comes on the demo disc.
The screen button has two modes. Tap it and it cycles through three brightness settings for the backlight. Hold it and it turns the screen off entirely. This is A Good Thing. When you're listening to MP3s, you don't need that screen burning up battery life.

The dead pixel problem
The screen on the PSP is LCD and as with all LCDs it does suffer from the potential for dead or stuck pixels. These are single pixels which don't respond correctly and stay stuck in one colour no matter what. Sometimes they clear themselves, other times they don't. My PSP has one stuck pixel. For $250 you'd expect perfection, but I can live with one. However there are reports around the internet of displays with dozens of dead pixels. Sony even put a disclaimer in their manual about it - it's an inherent problem with any LCD display. But if you play with the system for a couple of weeks and you really cannot live with the dead pixel (or pixels) then Sony support have said they'll deal with each person on a case-by-case basis. Whether that means you'll get a refurbished PSP or yours back with a new screen remains to be seen.
For what it's worth, I didn't know I had any problem until I downloaded a couple of images to use as test patterns. They showed the stuck pixel. Now I know it's there, I can see it all the time, but before I went looking, I'd never noticed it. That should give you some indication of how inobtrusive a single pixel can be.

Sound
The audio out of the speakers on the PSP is surprisingly competent. Plug in a set of headphones and it's even better. The audio button only works once headphones are plugged in and it cycles through a few predefined tonal values, such as Jazz, Pop, Heavy, etc.

On-screen menus
The OS has a real "wow" about it. The great power-on sound, the constantly-animating menu background etc. The on-screen menus guide you around a smorgasbord of functions built in to the PSP. You can select toolbox and change all the system settings in there. You can select memory card or UMD and for each you can tell it to look for music, movies, pictures or games. Navigating the menus is easy left-right-up-down stuff. Once you're playing music or a movie, you can hit the triangle button and it brings up an overlayed playback menu with stop, pause, rewind, info and other options. Press the triangle again and it goes away.

Things that the previews didn't tell you.
It seems Sony have listened to the public and learned from the mistakes of others. These are the things which, as a tech geek, make total sense to me. None of these features seemed to be mentioned in any of the previous of the PSP:

Removable battery.
At long freakin' last! Sony have learned from the iPod disaster and made their battery pack removable. So when that Lithium Ion battery bites the dust, you pop it out, buy a new one and pop the new one in. The battery life is claimed to be anything from 3 hours to 8 hours depending on what you're doing - ie. is the screen on, are you using WiFi etc. I can't comment on the actual battery life, but those figures do seem a little optimistic. But at least with a removable battery, you can buy a spare, charge it up and take it with you if you're going on a long flight.

The AC adapter
Another item Sony have got totally right. The AC adapter takes an industry standard two-pin style mains cable. And looking on the back of it, the input voltage is 100-240V. Thank you Sony, for realising that America is the only country on the planet that doesn't use 240V. This means that when you go on vacation, you can plug the AC adapter in and not blow it up.

Headphone remote.
Unlike so many other devices, Sony opted to make the headphones separate from the remote. ie. the remote is in-line, but you can plug your own headphones in to it. This turns out to be ab absolute must. Headphones you get in the value pack must be 49cent items - they are truly terrible in build quality, sound quality and comfort. Plus, if you use the PSP on an aircraft, the PSP can't generate enough volume through the supplied headphones to overcome the cabin noise. You'll absolutely need noise-cancelling headphones to get maximum benefit of the PSP while flying.

Wireless update.
So you probably know the PSP has built in WiFi. That's a great idea for multiplayer gaming, and what's even better is that you can disable the WiFi with a switch on the side of the PSP. This is a "must" if you're flying. But what amazed me was the Network Update feature. The WiFi can operate in two modes - AdHoc, which is where it just looks for other PSPs, and True Network. In True Network mode, you can set it up as a node on your home WiFi network if you have one. It will scan for available networks then ask you to enter a WEP encryption key. Once you do, the PSP is on your network. Once its on your network, you can select Network Update from the tools menu and it will connect to Sony over the internet and check for update system software. Yes - the PSP is future-compatible. Lets say they discover a bug in the OS. On every other portable device bar none, you'd need to buy a newer device. On the PSP, it will download a new BIOS to the memory card over a wireless internet connection, then flash the BIOS from the memory card and upgrade your PSP. How amazingly cool is that?

Memory cards.
Sure we've all seen the debates about Sony's proprietary memory stick format. So what? But the PSP doesn't take memory sticks. It takes Pro or ProDUO memory sticks, and there's two important differences. They're shorter than regular memory sticks, but they're also thinner. This means that despite having the identical contacts on the end, you can't get a full-size memory stick into the PSP. This to me was a disappointment. I have a Sony digital camera and I liked the idea that I could pop the memory stick out and look at the pictures on the PSP. But I can't. To do that I need to upgrade all my memory sticks to ProDUO sticks with full-size adapters (to fit into the camera). As I have nearly $300 already invested in camera memory, as well as $50 in a USB card reader for the PC, this is a huge bone of contention for me. Sony dropped the ball here - they absolutly positively should have allowed regular memory sticks to be used in the PSP. Because they force you to use the ProDUO sticks, I need to use the USB connection to get stuff on to them.

The USB connection.
The PSP has a mini-B style USB plug on it. Plug it into a USB port on your PC and select "USB Mode" from the toolbox, and it publishes the memory stick as a removable drive. You can then copy stuff on to it from your PC such as music, movies and pictures. The music must go into a specially-named "PSP" folder or the PSP won't see it. Given the amount of stuff they put in the value pack for the PSP, it seems odd that they neglected to include a USB cable. Sheesh. Come on Sony - you were doing so well with all the other things, why leave out a $5 USB cable??

The case
The value pack comes with a neoprene slip-case. Fortunately, the design of it means you have to put the PSP in at a slight angle so that once it's in, it can't slide out on its own. Another great piece of forward thinking. When in the slip case, the headphone port is still accesible.

The power button
The power button has a dual function on the PSP. Slide it down and it locks all the other buttons so they can't accidentally start messing with the PSP when its in the slip case. Slide it up to turn the PSP on and off. The PSP has two "off" modes but I can't figure out the difference. If you slide the power switch up, it puts the PSP into "sleep" mode. But if you slide it up and hold it for two seconds, it turns it into "off" mode. As far as I can tell, the only difference is that when you turn it back on from sleep mode, it goes back to where you were rather than "cold booting" with the flashy PSP intro.

In use - what's it like as a media machine?
One of Sony's big pushes with the PSP is that it's an all-around media player as well as a games machine.
For playing movies, there's no doubt that the machine is really cool, but I'm not sure Sony are going to be able to convince me to pay another $15 for movies I already own (see elsewhere in the review). For looking at pictures, it's also amazing. The clarity of the digital images is great, and you can view them cropped to fit the screen, or blown up to fill as much of it as possible. There's a slideshow option which literally slides the images in from the side of the screen, which is a nice touch. Hit the triangle button and it pops up the picture menu which has a couple of basic functions in it.
As a music player, others have noted that the PSP is mediocre at best - it doesn't allow playlists etc. It does allow shuffle mode, repeat mode, and music organised by folders, and it does have the various preset audio settings. Apart from the volume level being a little low through the headphones, I have no gripes about using it as an MP3 player. As far as I can see, with the potential for user-burnable UMDs, and the removable memory sticks, it has more advantages than an iPod in that you're not limited to a single built-in hard drive. Because of the BIOS update feature, it's entirely possible that Sony could listen to users and make changes in future updates. In Japan for example, they've already moved to v1.5 of the BIOS with some improvements (to bring it in line with the US version).

What about the games?
If you've read this far, you'll realise that I've not even mentioned games yet. There's a reason for this - I don't see the PSP as primarily a games machine. I see it as a media player that can play games. To that end, I didn't actually buy any games when I got the PSP - none of the first five or six really appealed to me. But that's the whole point - you don't need games for the PSP to shine. I played a couple of demos whilst in-store and they play great. The controls are generally responsive and that brilliantly bright screen makes everything look vibrant and sharp. The left thumb control is unique - rather than being a mini thumb stick, it's a sliding type controller. It self-centres but it slides around a miniature circular grid which the PSP reads as the analogue position. The rest of the controls will be familiar to anyone with a console Playstation (ie 1 or 2). I played Tony Hawk's Underground, and the gameplay was smooth and obvious. Same with some of the other titles. It seems that the software houses are making sure that the games are designed specifically for the PSP rather than taking existing games and trying to cram them into a smaller space. One exception was the NBA game - seemed to me like they were trying to get w-a-y too much information on to the screen at once and it all got a bit cluttered. But that's a function of the game, not the PSP itself.

The UMDs
Universal Media Disc?
Not sure what it means but it's basically a 1.8Gb mini DVD in a protective case. It actually looks like a Sony MiniDisc in a different carrier. For the PSP to truly shine, someone needs to come out with a USB-powered UMD burner for the PC. Once they do that, you'll be able to get 1.8Gb of MP3s or pictures on to your own UMDs. Until that happens, the only thing you're going to see on the UMDs are Sony-approved games and specially-formatted versions of selected movies. I'm not sure Sony will convince people to buy a second miniature version of a movie they already own for another $20. But those airport movie-rental places could make a total killing in this market if they offered UMDs as well as DVDs.

So there's two ideas if you're an entrepeneur looking for a way to make money - make me a UMD burner for my PC and allow me to rent UMD movies at the airport....

That screen again.
I do wonder, again, why they chose to cover the screen in hyper-glossy plastic. It renders the PSP unusable if you've got any light source of any kind behind you (like - oh I don't know - the sun?) because all you can see on the screen is the light, and the reflection of your face. This is particularly annoying on aircraft if the person in the seat behind you has their reading light on. Because of its position and the angle you'd typically hold a PSP at, you get a fabulous view of the reading light and the oxygen mask compartment, and whatever you're looking at on the PSP takes second place. The same is true outdoors. The screen makes a perfect mirror for watching the reflection of the clouds go by.
We invented non-reflective plastic 20 years ago - why isn't it on the PSP? In fact, if you're old enough to have ever seen or owned an Atari Lynx, you'll remember it used non-reflective plastic and looked all the much better for it.

The PSP isn't the first
That last sentence spurred me to add one extra paragraph to the review. In 1989, Atari launched the Lynx handheld video game. It was a little bigger than the PSP is, grey, with basic controls and a cartridge-based game system. I don't know if it was the short battery life, bad marketing, or that it was an idea 16 years ahead of its time, but the Lynx suffered in the marketplace and ultimately died off. Sega entered into the fray in 1991 with the GameGear. Another spectacular machine which seemed to suffer the same fate as the Lynx - probably due to battery life. The GameGear took 6 "AA" batteries and lasted a maximum of 3 hours. That was a pricey prospect. So now the PSP comes along and time will tell if the timing is right, the price is right and the longevity is right. I think the PSP has the benefit of the rechargable battery, disc and memory-card storage, and the ability to do more than just games. But remember this : when someone tries to tell you that their PSP is the first colour handheld games machine of its type on the market, it isn't. Yes, Nintendo got their first with their TFT-LCD on the Gameboy advance, but over a decade ago, the Atari Lynx and Sega GameGear ruled supreme. I should know - I still have both of them.

Overall
Despite the massive oversight of the memory stick problem, and the irritatingly reflective cover on the screen, the PSP is the portable device to have. It's an iPod on steroids. It plays music, movies, pictures and games. It's light, it has a replacable battery (are you listening, Apple?), and it's very desirable. I can't give it 5 stars though because of the inexplicable decision on the memory stick ProDUO and that damn shiny plastic screen cover.

Update after a week of ownership
A few things to update the review on.

Firstly - the availability at the time of writing of 1Gb Pro Duo memory sticks. There aren't any. Anywhere. A couple of sites are advertising the Sony ones for over $220 but most places sell the SanDisk item for around $120 and it's out of stock everywhere. Checking eBay shows a lot of auctions, but be very careful when you read the wording. Most of those are taking pre-orders for them with no guarantee of delivery. The prices are also suitably inflated. If you can live with 2 512Mb cards instead, then you're in luck - there's bazillions of those. Amazon are doing them for $62 so two 512Mb cards are actually cheaper than a single 1Gb card and you can get them now (April 2005).

Secondly - compressing your own movies. It's not immediately obvious, but if you want to put your own movies on to a memory stick, they need to go into a folder called "MP_ROOT" or the PSP won't see them. They also need to be compressed using MPEG-4 compression. Sony would like you to buy their "Image Converter 2" software to do this, but if you go to www.video2psp.com, there's links there to some third-party products which do a great job. The best one so far is RaPiZ PSP video converter (http://rapiz.gotdns.org/). It's in spanish and has a decidedly questionable interface in its first incarnation, but it does a bang-up job. I'm a total convert now (like I wasn't before?). Living in the US I miss some of the TV series from back in England (where I used to live). So I grabbed the first episode of the new Dr. Who series from BitTorrent and let RaPiZ converter chew on it for a bit and it got it down to 280Mb - easily small enough to fit onto my memory stick. It looks fantastic when played back on the PSP and will eat up some time on my next flight. Until someone comes out with a UMD burner, this is the way to go.

Thirdly - games. A Week in and I still don't own any games for the PSP. I'm tempted by Wipeout Pure but I need to see it first. I think this is a testament to the strength of the PSP as a media machine. I don't feel I "need" to have games for it to justify its use. I now have a couple of memory sticks loaded up with MP3s, photos and compressed video of some TV shows - I have about 6 hours of entertainment ready to go. Add a game and that would make any transatlantic flight (excuse the pun) fly by.

Finally - memory stick issues. It's worth noting the difference between the 4 types of memory stick.
Memory stick - the original
Memory stick Duo - the half-length version of the original
Memory stick Pro - the high-speed full-size new version which is thinner than the original
Memory stick Pro Duo - the half-length version of the Pro.

Memory Stick and Memory Stick Duo WILL NOT FIT the PSP. They're too thick. Memory Stick Pro and Pro Duo will fit but you'll only be able to get the little cover closed with the Duo - the plain Pro sticks are too long. Most Pro Duo cards come with an adapter to allow them to fit into full-size memory stick devices.

Update after two weeks of ownership and an acid test
A few more things to update the review on. I charged up the battery to max in readiness for a flight, and gave my PSP its first acid test - in-flight entertainment. I loaded up my memory stick with 90 minutes of video and about 4 hours of mp3s. Know what? After 90 minutes of video playback and 30 minutes of MP3s (short flight), the battery meter still read totally full. When I got to the hotel (business trip), I replayed the 90 minutes of video again, then played all 4 hours of music. As I type this part of the review, I'm 2 hours in to some more music and the battery meter has finally dropped to half. Now the video was coming from a memory stick, not the UMD drive so the battery wasn't being taxed as heavily, but even so - 3 hours of video and 6.5 hours of music to get it to half-battery. As a result, I've upgraded my review to 5 stars. My concerns about battery life have been considerably lessened by a good test away from any power supplies.
As a side note, which isn't really relevant to a lot of people but I thought I'd put it in anyway, the power adapter for the PSP outputs 5V DC at 2 amps. Why is this relevant? Turns out my PDA power supply AND my cellphone power supply all do the same. So I only needed to pack the PSP power supply for my business trip and be able to power / charge all my devices. It's worth checking your battery powered devices too if you get a PSP.....:-)

Update July 05 - 3 months of ownership
Thought it was worth a quick update. I still haven't got any games for the PSP, nor played any on it. Frankly, the more games I see, the less inclined I am to buy one - it's a terrible selection right now. My PSP has however been under near constant use as a movieplayer and mp3 player. Still well worth the money. If I ever get a game, I'll add to the review but as far as this reviewer is concerned, this is a media machine first and foremost, and a games machine as a second thought.

Update July 21 - 3.5 months of ownership
Ok so my birthday came and went and now I have three games for the PSP. Lumines and Smart Bomb - both puzzlers, and Wipeout Pure - the quintessential PSP racer. So finally I can update the review with a little info on games. The control methods are wide and varied, and the PSP is a little small for someone with larger hands. It can get clumsy trying to use the left- and right-shoulder buttons mid-game but as long as you're not trying to use the PSP whilst standing up (ie you can rest your elbows somewhere) it shouldn't be a problem. The analog d-pad works surprisingly well in-game and all the other buttons have a good feel to them. The one thing which has become obvious is the potential for a short PSP lifespan. Given how often you see totally wrecked PS2 controllers, it's fair to imagine that some gamers will mash up their PSP controls in a similar manner. As they're all built-in to the PSP, dead controls equals dead PSP and I bet Sony will charge a mint to replace them.
The graphics and sound capabilities of the PSP in-game are impressive. The shiny screen is still extremely annoying and the built-in speakers aren't up to much. Best to use headphones - it sounds much better, plus you're not using precious battery power to drive the amp.
Battery power in-game seems to be about 3.5 hours for graphics- and CPU-intensive games, or about 4 hours for puzzle games. Sounds short but for $19 you can now buy the Pelican power brick which you can use to triple the life of the PSP battery. If you can't get all the game you want out of 12 hours of battery life, then you're on a longer flight than I'd ever want to be on. Bear in mind that the battery life will last longer if you play games for a couple of hours then watch a movie and listen to music. It's far less power-hungry to decode video or audio. Especially audio - turn off the screen and you can get 10 hours out of the regular battery. That's ipod territory.