I’m loving this machine. I’ve always said that I would love it if they could make a Playstation 2 that is portable; that is basically what the PSP is. The downside of this is that the load times for the games are comparable to the load times of a regular PS2.
Still the graphics and game play blow the Nintendo DS out of the water. The controls are ones that you are used to, unlike the odd touchscreen on the DS, which feels a bit awkward. This weekend, I traded some X-box games and got two more games for the PSP: Dynasty Warriors and Untold Legends, which is very similar to Diablo / Diablo 2 (two of my favorite games), so I am loving it. I’ll write some basic reviews of the games later. In short, the PSP out-of-the-gates is offering better-looking and more dynamic games than the DS, which has been out for several months now.
The screen is amazingly crisp and clear. It gets smudges easily, but it comes with an included cloth to wipe it clean (and meanwhile, what is everyone who complains about this doing putting their fingers all over the screen anyway?). I bought a set of 4 disk covers and a screen protector from Best Buy for 9 bucks. The disk protectors are must-haves. The crappy screen cover wouldn’t screw on properly and kept popping off ever time I tried to close / open it, so I threw it away. Too much trouble to return it. I don’t remember the name of the package, but it you see it, don’t bother getting it. Hold out for the disk covers to be sold separately.
The battery life on the PSP isn’t as great as on the Nintendo portables, but it’s still not horrible. I haven’t tested it thoroughly, but I’d guess about 6-8 hours of game play on a charge. The audio from the built-in speakers is good in a quiet room, but not so hot in a noisy one. Fortunately, the included headphones are nice. The audio seems to be a bit better for the video games than for movies. Spiderman 2 required an almost silent room; otherwise, it was headphones.
I also picked up a 256MB Memory Stick Duo card from Best Buy, and I already had a USB media reader that could handle Memory Sticks, so moving files from my Mac to the PSP is a breeze. You just have to follow the instructions in the PSP’s manual to know where to put everything and what folders are needed. I’ve played around with both ffmpegX, iPSP, and PSPWare. ffmpegX works, but doesn’t always produce file that the PSP will recognize. PSPWare is a little annoying in that there is no way to quit the program once it has been launched. It just keeps running in the background. I finally had to look up its PID in top and then kill it. iPSP is the smoothest and nicest video converter for the PSP. I’ve just been using the demo to compress the video and then I drag the files over manually, but I still may spring for the full product. I’ll probably write more detailed reviews of these programs over at TUAW later today / this week.
Right now, I have Friday night’s episode of BattleStar Gallactica pulled off my ReplayTV, re-compressed via iPSP into MPEG4, and loaded up on the PSP. Very cool.
I’m going to follow up with another post in a few minutes on what Sony should do to really make the PSP the best portable gadget out there.
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