Sony PSP
I picked up a Sony PSP while I was in Singapore this last time. I screwed myself out of S$30 on the deal arguing over price (had it at S$625 at one point for the ceramic white value pack, 1GB Pro Duo, 3 games, hard case, screen protector and car charger). After reviewing the price on some of the games, I probably could have done about that well putting the whole thing together from Ebay (probably a little bit more with S&H and some used games), but then I wouldn't have been able to play it on the plane on the way back, and also I got to take a look at the screen before buying it to check for dead/stuck pixels. Ended up getting it all for about US$405. Mine has 2 little stuck red pixels on the right side that you can only see when the screen is black. I'm going to try to run the stuck pixel burn in flasher movie a couple times and see if it will clear them, but even if it doesn't, it is pretty good.

I'm VERY amazed with how good the screen looks. And while a lot of people seem to complain about the poor battery life, I was very amazed with the 5+ hour life I seemed to get out of it, even with the screen brightness up to max (and especially considering you are powering that beautiful 480x272 screen and the UMD drive, that seems pretty amazing to me out of the 3.6v 1800mah battery). The white ceramic unit I got is very clean and has very nice lines. It feels solid and fits quite nicely in my hands. The screen does seem to pull finger prints out of thin air, no matter how careful you are, but they clean up nice. I also got a screen protector, but that seems like a dumb gimick, since it is very hard to put it on without getting minor bubbles in it and doesn't seem to help the glare too much. Also, you can buy replacement face plates (including the screen) for under US$35, so I'll probably just do that.

The wireless seems to work pretty well (only 802.11b, but supports WEP and WPA and works just fine with my home wireless network on WPA TKIP and worked very well in the airport lounges on autoscan). Web browsing is a little tough with the screen realestate being pretty small, but it is better than my Blackberry mMode. Some extensive sites were rough and fill up the cache fast (default is 512KB, but I kicked that up to 1MB and most seem to load). Some have too many graphic forms that fill the page and give very little readable space, but the more simple pages were VERY easy to read news and follow links and stuff.

Movies and MP3 playback is very good, and I've even encoded a couple DVD's and TV shows to the MPEG4 format and placed it on the PSP (I'm going to be going through Flash memory VERY fast at this rate, and I already ordered a 2GB Pro Duo for $89 to supplement my 1GB). A pretty good encoder for the PSP is PSP Video 9, and works well. In most cases, you can get a very good widescreen encode with very little compression loss and good audio at just under 200MB/hour with the MPEG-4 AVC codec support, though it takes my P4-3GHz about 20 minutes/hour to encode.

I also picked up GTA for it, so I can Hack it, of course. There is a save game exploit that gives you access to a boot loader that allows you to run homebrew software, as well as up clock the PSP dual core CPU from 250MHz to 333MHz (this was the original planned speed, but I guess Sony dropped it down to 250MHz due to power consumption). One of the coolest little hacks is a wireless remote control function to control all sorts of home devices from your PSP. I need to get some of the emulators up and running and see how NES, SNES and GameBoyColor ROMS play on this.

I also am planning to get an additional replacement 2600mah battery or maybe even one of the 8in1 Game Grips that adapts the PSP's memory stick pro duo to SD/MMC/CF/MD/MS flash support and has additional standard 4xAA battery slots. Also, there are some really great looking replacement faceplates that look very nice, and come with replacement screens. For ~$6 each ($30 for a 5 pack from Divineo, I'm not sure why you would even bother with screen protectors...


- posted by Jeff @ 8:47 AM | 3 comments