Sony PSP Go

The Sony PSP Go has now been officially announced after months of speculation.  The PSP Go has some interesting new features, although we do not yet know the technical specifications! Despite the PSP Go's snazzy design and sleek looks, I feel that there is something lacking from the latest handheld offering from Sony.

The New PSP differs in several ways to the original.  For startes the latest PSP Go does not use the UMD drive, originally the propietry format of the PSP. Instead the PSP Go can download games straight on to it's rather tasty 16GB internal flash storage.  The largest benefit of the Sony PSP Go is however it's size. It has been shrunk considerably, thanks in part to it's new slider style control mechanism.

Ok enough of my generic ramblings on the Sony PSP Go, lets get in to some detail here!

My biggest dislike is how they have reduced the screen size from 4.3 inches to 3.8 inches.  This may not seem like much, but since they are still trying to sell the PSP Go as a movie watching device, a smaller screen seems to me like the opposite way to go. 

The inbuilt storage is a godsend, 16GB is not to be sneezed at, and definately gives the PSP Go the ability to be a portable music, movie, and games machine.  It also has an expansion slot so you can increase the storage size even more!  

Yes, as mentioned earlier the UMD drive is gone.  This is not particularly a huge loss, the disks were a pain to carry around, leading to many people getting cracked games and downloading them on to memory sticks.  Removal of this drive 'should' also improve battery life, and has helped cut down the size of this portable device.

The controls of the Sony PSP Go may seem a bit cramped at first, and took me some getting used to.  Fortunately the sunk areas prevent miss-clicks (A real pain on the original PSP) and help give some form and style to an otherwise bland looking device. Despite current popularity, touch screen has not been implemented in to this device.  The lack of this confused many people, who viewed the upcoming new PSP release as a possible iTouch contender.

The usual fare of games will be released with the PSP Go, along with backwards compatability for old games which can now be downloaded from Sony.  The new games should be pretty good, however they do not seem to bring anything new to the table.

The PSP Go is aimed much more to the music and movies market.  It can download Movies and Music DRM free straight from a WiFi connection, rather than via a PC or PS3 in previous PSP releases.  There will not be a Sony owned store for this, instead it will partner with eMusic, which lets you buy music from many free sources.

While the PSP Go has WiFi it has also been given bluetooth, allowing wireless headsets, internet connection via cell phones, and the faint possibility of PS3 controller connections.  This minor addition gives a whole range of benefits to the PSP Go, but may affect battery life.

All in all the PSP Go is a solid handheld media device. While it does not compete with MP3/MP4 players on the market, it is a great gaming device.  While SOny have not as of yet released the technical specifications, there is nothing so far that would make me upgrade from my original PSP.  My general feeling is that Sony should have integrated a touch screen, and a phone (or at least VOIP) function so it could compete with some of the similar devices on the market at this time.  Touch screen would have been particularly useful for things such as entering text, which is still woefully slow.

The Sony PSP Go will be released in America on October 1st 2009 for $249!