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In the last few days, I’ve been away from my usual “routine”. My after hours have been taken by a small giant named Sony Playstation Portable, or PSP as you wish.

You can describe it in a short sentence: It’s incredible! You have to play with it to believe. Forget all the photos, all the reviews, everything you have been told. PSP is more than a console, it’s a full featured portable media center, the “walkman” of the 21st century.

I’m not an early adopter, meaning I tend to wait and see how new technology behave months after being launched to public. I love to try new tech but when it comes to investments I’m very careful.

If you keep an eye on my blog, you know I was tempted to get an iPod, mainly to replace my broken Creative Jukebox 3… Being able to carry all your music library is great, but something made me “look” to the PSP.

I never understood all the hype with small media players, like the nano or the shuffle, all they can offer is portability, and ranging from 1GB to 4GB… not much compared to 20GB, so the 20GB iPod was my main target, WAS until I tried a PSP. I felt the same tingling feeling I had when I got my first Gameboy back in the 90’s. I’ve changed my mind in a snap, the power of a PSP is awesome. You got to see the LCD screen to understand what I’m saying, it’s so clear, better than much portable dvd players around.

I had to rethink it all again. Being able to play games, music, videos and photos in a huge screen was much more than the iPod could offer me and it was cheaper. So, after some thinking I made my mind and I got one (actually my girlfriend helped saying that my mind was made and asked me what was I waiting for).

Fnac had only a few games, so I grabbed Wipeout Pure (hoping that the old Wipeout spirits could return after the flop that Wipeout Fusion was) and a UMD movie to experience the PSP movie features. I got Steamboy, an Anime title from the director of Akira.

I got home, unpacked and powered the beast with the demo UMD that comes bundled with. It asked me to upgrade my firmware to 2.0, and so I did. After the firmware was upgraded it was time to check the demos. Music clips, Spiderman 2 trailer and trailers from the launch games. Once again the image was superb, the Spiderman trailer has better quality than the .mov available from the movie site.

But enough from the demo UMD. Wipeout Pure was calling, I popped in the UMD and it was bliss! The graphics, the video, the techno tracks, it was all there… Then it came to the game itself. My God, the 3D is so fluid, the playability was back from the old Wipeout days.

After a few races, I played the “hack the PSP” game. I’ve explored all the menus, all the settings, configured it to connect to my wireless router (and it failed using WPA encryption, had to use WEP) and surf time was up!

The PSP browser is great, with some cool features like resizing modes, and you can even use a mouse like pointer with the analog stick… Sony had it all planned.

I’ll have to end this post, it’s getting to damn big, but not before saying something:

If you are planning to buy a PSP, do it! If you aren’t then think about it seriously. You won’t be disappointed.

[tags]PSP, iPod, Wipeout Pure, Steamboy, consoles[/tags]