review

A few years back, the PSP had been launched in Japan and I was drooling at the pictures that adorned nearly every gaming site I went to. I even got to play about on an import model at my local CEX store and was mesmerised for a while.
It was a mix of “must have shiny” and “it’s like the gamegear had been thru the slimfast diet!”.

The only thing that saved me from buying it then was the poor line-up of games and the dearth of support for its media capabilities.

Fast forward to today and, while the game catalogue still hasn’t improved much, the media abilities of the now even trimmer PSP slim are very tempting indeed. Yet, I still held out from buying one.. That is, until I got my hands on a single game…

A friend of mine brought over his Japanese copy of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core (why do they get all the cool stuff!?) and I had nothing but “I gotta get me one of them” in my head for weeks.

I finally caved in to the voices in my head and bought one and, well I thought I’d put my experiences with it down somewhere!

The first thing you’ll notice is the total lack of a carry case in the box, and the sudden paranoia of “but, I don’t want my shiny to get dirty!” whenever you think about having to carry it around in your bag. For the price they are charging for this thing (the UK is getting gouged for a scary £130!) you’d have thought they’d be willing to give you a few extras to show they cared

If you didn’t get your PSP Slim with a memory stick then it’s certainly advised that you get one otherwise every game you load will scream about it and you’ll never be able to save any games, also things such as favourites and RSS feeds don’t work unless you get a card.
The type you need is a least a memory stick duo (if you have one of the big arsed original memory sticks you’re shit out of luck, if you have one of the tiny m2’s you will need the adapter that makes it big enough to fit into this thing), make sure you don’t get drawn into paying over the odds for a “gaming class” card cause, frankly you’re pissing extra money up against the wall.
To give you an idea of how much you should be paying, a 1Gb memory stick duo card should be going for about £20 and cheaper on the net, don’t get sucker punched by retail shops.

Once you have a memory card in your PSP, the full functions are available to you and allow you to get down to the whole point of it – enjoying yourself.

Having owned a DS for over a year the biggest problem is with the accept and reject buttons – they’re the opposite way around to the DS so I found myself accepting things I didn’t want and cancelling out of things I wanted to do, frustrating for a while but you soon get your fingers reprogrammed.

The extra memory onboard has improved load times of games and the various apps, but I still notice a rather sizable load time when the PSP has to read from its UMD, which does leave you feeling a bit let down – after all, it’s the whizziest and shiniest portable around, which makes you wish this thing would move a bit quicker when loading your game!

Beyond that, when you do get your game going you certainly notice just how much more grunt under the hood the thing has compared to the DS, even though you’ve prolly grown accustomed to better graphics on your consoles and/or PC you still catch yourself being blow away by just what the small thing can do.. You also begin to wonder how the DS is kicking it’s arse in terms of sales until you remember about the choice of games you have and you quickly remember why, even without homebrew titles the DS seemingly has a better selection of games that are fun to pick up and play (you remember fun right?).

I’ve not had a chance to try out the wireless play, partly because I don’t know anyone else with a PSP and partly because I’ve found its wifi to be quite dodgy at times – randomly telling you that it can’t find your access point, telling you the security settings are wrong and then randomly actually getting onto your wifi network – not very helpful in the slightest but something that I chalk up to the intrinsic problems of wifi, tho I did get it complain to me about my dedicated DS wireless network that the key I’m using isn’t a valid WEP key… I think sony have some problems with their wireless comms modules!

Also, with the power of a wifi enabled device that has a web browser on it, I have to say that I quite often caught myself doing a bit of naughty war walking and it not only scares me but makes me concerned just how many unsecured wireless networks there out in the wild.

This leads me quite neatly onto the web browser functionality (funny that ).
The browser powering the PSP’s access is known as NetFront and is quite lacking in features – it has a basic support for flash but not enough for the likes of youtube, revver, break or your other fav flash video sites.
It has problems with displaying other sites (CSS issues etc) and you can often fall foul of the poor space for caching, which can lead to you having to close the browser and open it back up again.
Many of your fav “web 2.0” (I hate that buzz word) sites won’t work if they’re running stuff like AJAX and ruby-on-rails.

That’s not to say that you can’t browse anything, but be prepared for many things to not work at all or to not be fully supported by your PSP.
The way in which you navigate makes good use of the limited interface, you can either use the D-pad to hop from one link to the other or you can flip to a bigger screen and use the analogue stick to move the mouse pointer around freely, hold down the square button to scroll from left to right and up n down.
The text entry is quite tedious, but with some handy quick choices to reduce the number of buttons you have to mash in order to get down the address you want.

Possibly the single biggest letdown is just how painful it is to browse the net using the very small resolution that the PSP’s screen runs at.

When you take the performance, it shows that the PSP is crying out for some opera muscle to power it rather than the limp NetFront. The interface is as good as it’s gonna get on your PSP tho and the lack of a touch interface (I occasionally found myself tapping the screen if I had been messing about with my DS prior to whipping out the PSP) does quite knock back the experience.

With the browser out of the way, we’re left with the movie, music and photo side of the device.
Starting off with the music abilities, it’s pretty simple and easy to use. I did notice with mine it created an MP3 folder on my memory card but it helpfully doesn’t pull the data from there creating a folder called “MUSIC” in the root of the card did the job.
It picked up the album art and displayed it and there is pretty much nothing else to go wrong, it took my test mp3 and played it without a glitch.

For video you have 2 choices, you can use the UMD slot and buy videos – sadly they can’t be used anywhere else and while they have dropped in price quite a lot (many titles are now £4.99), there are still too many with a price tag of £10 and higher that just will never shift.
Your other choice is to go with the memory card by loading up your memory stick with either mp4 or H.264 encoded videos – just make sure to dump them into a folder called “VIDEO” otherwise you’ll be told that there’s no video on your card, chances are you’ll have to guess that it needs this folder and create it yourself… To a not very savvy member of the public, this could prove to be a difficult task and lead to them only ever using UMD’s for their videos (I wonder if this was the plan all along).

I do think that UMD’s are due to die a horrible death anyway, especially with the news from the 2008 CES event that you can use a PS3 to transfer a copy of a bluray movie to the memory card of your PSP by simply inserting the disc, connecting up your PSP and hitting transfer. This is a master stroke and is certainly putting their machines to good use as well as catching onto the fact that we consumers want to be able to take and use our media when, where and how we like!
If only they had figured this out with DVD’s too!

The photo section is pretty much self explanatory really; if you have any pictures in the DCIM folder it’ll simply display them. This is the part of the PSP that I haven’t really used and seriously doubt I ever will too.. some people might find it useful, most people I reckon won’t bother with it either!

My final point on the PSP Slim is with the charging, you have the choice of using the supplied charger or using USB to charge the device. As anyone who has seen my youtube video can attest, I love the ability to charge devices using their built in USB ports. It reduces clutter and pointless unplugging and plugging in of items into and out of my power strips.
Yet, as ever with sony, it’s never as easy as plugging in the USB port and leaving it to work its magic on the battery. Oh no, sony forces you to first enable the setting for USB charging and then you have to activate USB communications before it actually begins to charge the device, breaking the number one rule – keep it simple stupid!
Why they thought it would be necessary to have the device on (so if it runs completely flat you’re in trouble) and to begin talking to your host device (quite blissfully ignoring the potential to simply use a plug with a USB jack on the end of it) is totally beyond me and just smacks of a half hearted effort at what should be a pretty standard feature.

I never bothered to buy the webcam as I don’t really see much of a use for it (plus it’s a bit of a rip off for what it is too).
I have, of course, not even mentioned the promised features that are to be coming in the future – the addition of Skype (tho you need to buy and use a sony headset in order to communicate) and the launch in Japan of a digital TV tuner, which I can only hope makes an appearance over here in the west (stop keeping all of the cool toys!).

Sadly, even tho the PSP has great media features and a handy browsing feature, it still remains quite ignored compared to my very loved DS and this is purely because I’m struggling to find any games other than the Mega Drive collection that actually gets my attention…
Until the time comes for crisis core to be released in the UK, my poor PSP will no doubt gather yet more dust until it gets to show how bright it can shine.