Courtesy of release day delivery by Amazon, I got my new PSP on the 14th of September and fell in love with it right away.
I never really considered my old PSP to be a porker – I carried it about regardless of the size, although I’d generally leave my protective case for it behind due to the bulk of it. However, the new one is light enough to be popped in my jacket pocket without adding the kind of baggage that the old PSP did. In fact, it’s now so light that I keep thinking I’ve forgotten it after I’ve put it in my pocket – no doubt I’ll get used to it and wish it was smaller and lighter again in the months ahead.
It’s not just the reduction of size and weight that makes the difference, though, it’s the extra memory and the disc caching feature that brings that makes it a joy to use. For example, in Test Drive Unlimited when driving at the fastest speeds the game had trouble getting the data off of the UMD fast enough, so you’d occasionally fall into the blue nowhere and ruin the race you were in. Not so with the PSP 2000 – the disc caching is brilliant at keeping everything slick. It even helps with load times in my poker game, so it’s not just useful for titles with heavy disc access during gameplay.
Today I picked up the AV Cable for displaying the output of the new PSP on a TV and it was pretty cool trying it out when I got home. Sadly some of the DVD’s I’d ripped a while back were at too low a quality and looked a bit nasty on the big screen, even though they looked fine on the PSP. Those I’d ripped at a high quality were perfectly good enough to watch on the big screen, so I’ve stuck a few movies on my memory stick for us to watch while we’re away on holiday, should the TV in the chalet have an AV connection.
All in all I’m really pleased with the new PSP – I only wish it had had these features from the start, as it’s definitely a more attractive portable console than the original.
As for my old PSP?
Well, the idea was that I’d sell it to justify buying a new one, but then Fliss figured she’d kind of like to have one of her own, so it gets to stick around for the time being. 🙂
