The PSP Go

There's little things that bother me more than when a company gets so close to exaclty what I want and then screws everything up in the details. There is one company that holds the record for dissapointments of this kind for me, that company is Sony. The PSP Go is a solid piece of hardware. It has a large screen, and a pretty decent design. It's lacking a second thumbstick but they claim it's because they wanted compatibility with older games and with the PSP-3000 which is still on sale. They finally killed UMD, which makes this device dependent on memory stick storage, which works fine for me since I didn't want to be messing around with physical media on my portable device to begin with. Then there's smaller bite size games for the platform called PSPminis that will provide instant entertainment in manageable portions for my daily commute. It's everything I wanted in a handheld... A year ago. The thought of walking around with two devices seriously makes me ill. I was finally able to stop carrying my computer around when I bought my iPhone, and the amazing app community that has rallied around the device is seriously remarkable. I would love a device that does both. Plays serious video games and is also my personal communications hub. The N-Gage had it right, only that it did both things poorly. The iPhone on the other hand is slowly getting there. They perfected the personal communications and then allowed the developers to build games for it and extend it's platform. Sony still has an opportunity to get into the market though since the iPhone's biggest drawback for gaming is it's lack of a physical control mechanism. And while I would love for it to have a phone built in, I'm sure the limitation is battery life, hell, I get terrible battery life from my iPhone when playing Peggle, I don't even want to know what would happen with a 3D action/adventure platformer. At the end of the day it's all about the games though. And of the thousands of games that the iPhone has, most are worthless. If you want a really fleshed out game the iPhone has yet to crack that market. The PSP is getting Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker and Parasite Eve 3, I need to play those games. It really sucks that they scrapped the UMD to download program, but there's still talks of something being worked on and I'm confident they understand just how important it is for them to figure this out. So in conclusion, I'm going to finally buy a PSP this year to keep at the office, the PSPGo might just be that PSP. Pricing was not aggressive at all so Im sure it'll come down some soon or the retailers will start bundling games with it. All in all, great job Sony! Other than the pricing, the PSPGo is in my opinion the best PSP they could have built while maintaining good battery life and backwards compatibility.