Nate's Programming Blog

Well I did it. I took the plunge and dropped $250 on the new PSP. I also go Need For Speed Underground Rivals also. Let me just say this…”Oh My God”, this thing rocks. The graphics are awesome, it looks so sexy, and the features are great. First I’ll go over my concerns before buying the PSP. The first concern I had was the issues I was hearing with the battery. Well I charged up my PSP fully Saturday night, I took it with me to Columbia on Sunday and played it off and on through out the day. I took it with me to work Monday and today, playing it before after and during lunch. I also played it last night for about an hour, and it is still showing that I have about an hour and 10 minutes left. Basically I’m getting about 3 to 3.5 hours a charge out of it, much better than the reviews that say 2 hours. Also it is real simple to take the battery in and out and you can buy more batteries if you want. They are $40 each and I highly recommend it.

The second concern I had was with load times. I heard the load times for the PSP were lengthy. Well atleast with the game I got that hasn’t been the case. It takes about 5-10 seconds to load a track to race on, so it probably will depend on how the game is designed.

The third issue was with the square button. I heard that there was a design flaw and since the button is so close to the screen they had to adjust the sensor right of center on the button. Well if that is the case it must be very minor because I certaintly can not tell.

On the other side, the features are absolutely awesome. First I have to talk about the screen. The thing is huge! It almost seems like that is all there is. It seriously takes up about 2/3 of the surface. The picture is crystal clear, and I can’t tell any difference between the games on the PSP and the Playstation 2 although I know that the PSP is a little more limited. The UMD discs that the PSP take are only 1.8 gigs compared to the PS2’s 4 gig discs. Come on though, it’s a handheld. What is the size of the Nintendo DS games? I guarantee you they are 1.8 gigs.

The next feature is the fact that it will play mp3, mp4 and also supports jpeg. It has a memory stick expansion slot as well as 64 megs of internal memory. I guess memory stick is the actual type of media because the card is smaller than my secure digital card in my camera. From what I can tell you can get up to a 512 mb stick for it. I can’t wait until they get up to 1 gig (I appologize if they have), because then I will be able to convert all of my DVDs to mpeg4 and copy them on to the memory stick and watch them on my PSP 🙂 The other features include built in Wi-Fi, very awesome and easy to setup even on a 128bit secure wireless network that doesn’t broadcast the ssid and has static ips, usb (mini-b type, which of course I don’t have and doesn’t come with it) which is used to copy data to the memory stick and last it came with ear buds that are awesome. I hear they are the same ones that come with the iPod, but I’m not for sure on that.

Well anyway, here are some images for the purpose of causing envy 🙂