by Vime Group

Created on: April 03, 2007   Last Updated: May 04, 2007

Ever since the E3 press conference in 2003, when Sony first announced their efforts towards a handheld gaming system, the Playstation Portable (PSP) received an enormous amount of speculation and rumor concerning its capabilities and future. Its release date came and went with only a minimal amount of chaos. Now, more than two years after its launch, Sony's PSP seems to be struggling to make ends meet. Why is this? Let's take a closer look at the PSP to see what it does right and see where it is failing. Finally we'll talk about what the future may still hold for the PSP and see if we can find any ways to fix its mistakes.

Top 5 Things the PSP Did Right

1.) Widescreen: While the PSP has an excellent variety of default hardware the best of them is, by far, the widescreen picture. Yes, I know the PSP is great because it's like having a MP3 player, web browser, home super theater yada yada yada. Seriously, no matter what Sony tries to sell it as, at the end of the day the PSP is a portable game console. Sure, those other features are great, but they're all just icing on the cake and not the cake itself. So when it comes down to it, having a wide, crystal clear picture staring out at you from a handheld device is amazing. This is especially true considering that, historically; handheld game systems have had small, hard-to-see screens.

2.) Battery: Another common complaint from handhelds in the past is that the batteries never seem to last long enough. Either the rechargeable batteries lost their potency after a few months, or feeding the systems battery addiction got very costly. The PSP fixes all these problems with its extremely long lived rechargeable batteries. I, personally, have had two PSPs since they launched and my batteries still regularly last for upwards of ten hours. As a bonus, the batteries don't take too long to fully recharge either.

3.) Built-in WiFi: Having built in WiFi capabilities is a beautiful thing. Being able to recline back in my chair and play some Ratchet and Clank in multiplayer without any annoying cords getting in my way is nice. Simply being able to connect to the internet through the PSP to play game is good enough, but being able to download demos and other content is just icing on the cake.

4.) MP3 Player: In a perfect world this feature would fall father down on the list. While being able to play MP3s on the PSP is a nice novelty remember that, ultimately, it is a gaming system. If people are buying this primarily to use it as a

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