PSP first impressions

I tried to resist, I really did.
So I'm at Kendari Digital on Saturday buying supplies for a BBQ/Baby Shower (emphasis on the BBQ!) that my family and a friend's are throwing for a mutual friend. Right there in the store was a deal - PSP, 2 games, and starter accessories for Rp1.200.000. Not a spectacular deal, but enough to get me to plop it into the cart.

Sitting on the tailgate of the pickup Rudi and I busted into the impervious packaging to take a look at the beast. The battery reporting 15% full, with 0:38 remaining. We put in Twisted Metal Head-On and gave it a whirl. Wow.

Net result, I now have Lumines, Wipeout Pure, and Twisted Metal. Wipeout and Twisted Metal were included in the package, and Lumines got really good reviews for a puzzle game (which seems like a good use of the device).

Hardware

The screen is bright, but the surface is too shiney so you get lots of glare. I'll have to try a anti-glare screen for it and see if that helps. However even in bright daylight it is still readable. There are buttons everwhere, and the small analog stick on the front is easily missed by first time users (they think it is a speaker or mic).

Some of the switches aren't very intuitive. The WLan on/off switch looks like it toggles between WLan and Memorystick. There is a button with a rectangle on it, that actually toggles the brightness of the screen. The power button is a flick on, flick off, lock down for "hold". I think I would have prefered a three state switch.

The headphones that came with are OK, although everything about the device is black - except the headphones. They are trying a little too hard at the iPod wanna-be if you ask me. The headphone remote is a nice touch, but the part feels really cheap and light. We'll see how long it lasts.

Overall reasonable ergonomics.

The built in WLan is pretty cool, can't wait to find someone else with one to try it out with!

Sony f#@!king media

I get it, Sony is so cool they can't use any other standard media. Not only can they not use other people's media, they won't even use their own. The memory is MemoryStick Duo, which seems next to impossible to find in 1GB sticks. The media for the games is "UMD" (The hubris to call it a "universal" media disk is just amazing). The UMB is almost as nice as Sony's proprietary Mini-Disk, except that they left a part of the optical media unprotected in the sleeve. ugh.

The size of the UMD is nice, however because of the open hole in the case, you have to keep them in the largish box, or I'll have to investigate a new storage mechanism.

Games

So far the games are pretty cool. The controls take some getting used to, but they play really well. The small screen makes twitch games like Twisted Metal tough, but Wipeout has no problem on the device, and Lumines is very cool. Probably the coolest thing, when you turn the power off it *suspends* instead of shutting down. You can flick the power off in the middle of combat, go back to real life, flick it back on and continue. I wish any other system (any!) did something that nice.

The selection of games right now isn't great. Gamespot's PSP section is anemic, and many of the games are getting pretty low numbers. Final Fantasy looks like it will be super promising. Combining suspend with an RPG that I can carry anywhere sounds amazing. I'm thinking that Tony Hawk might be the next game to acquire, but I'm going to play with these three for a while.

Movies, Music, and Pictures

I didn't buy movies on UMD, but I watched the trailers on the sample disk that came with. The screen looks great for them. Once I get my 1GB MS I'll probably get a ripper and try putting some movies on. My gut says that this will rock as an MP3 player, i'm hoping that i'll end up with the 40GB iPod for "serious" music, but that I can live with 1GB of lower quality music for extremely portable scenarios (airplane?). Not sure if pictures are going to be that interesting of an application.

This device definetly is competitive with many of the consoles on the market today, and from a portable it is by far the nicest one I've ever seen. It's amazing to me that it just blows away the quality of experience that I've seen on Windows CE machines. Animation, movies, music, it all flows seamlessly. I haven't played with a portable MCE device yet, so maybe that will make me feel better.

I think this is just a great product, and a killer entry for Sony into the portable space.