I have mentioned my XBox several times before on this blog. Coming from a PC platform and giving such praise to the XBox says a lot I guess. Like some, I am a “single console” guy, mainly because I don’t have enough time for multiple consoles. So something like Playstation 2 was out of the question. Besides, most games today are published on multitude of platforms.

But portable factor is something completely different. If you had the chance to get a console that fits in your pocket, plays music, videos and games, has 3–6 hours of battery life, would you take it? I did.

My buddies and I have an arrangement – when one of us has a birthday, the other three contribute financially toward a gadget or two – thanks guys! This year I decided to go for the Playstation Portable (PSP) with 2GB of MemoryStick “storage”. Based on several comments from people like Scott Hanselman, I knew that besides from playing the games I will be able to use the PSP as a cheap portable media player – at the moment, 2GB black version is slightly over 250€.

The console is great. It has a clear, wide screen, good battery life, plays videos in a standard mp4 format, as well as mp3 and wma audio formats (the last one was added recently). The UI looks quite like Microsoft’s Media Center UI, which is good – it’s easy to navigate through and reasonably organized. Firmware updates are trivial – just configure the network access and click “Network Update”. PSP has 802.11b Wi-Fi built in and works with WPA encryption. New features are added all the time as new firmware versions come out. At the moment, I am running version 2.81. Games ship on a proprietary UMD media which is write only (and there are no recorders out there). UMD discs are very small and fit about 1.8GB of data, which is plenty for an average game. I’ve been playing burnout (see the screenshot above) and it looks great, slightly less cars and detail but in general just like its PS2 or XBox counterpart, soundtrack and all included.

But the great thing about this is timing – I ordered the console from French Amazon and a few games from Amazon UK. Both shipped the same day, the former was supposed to arrive a day before my birthday and the latter a day or two later. My birthday was on Saturday which means that if postman did not find us at home I would have to wait till Monday to pick any package at the post office.

But the stars aligned and both of the packages arrived and were delivered on Saturday  Talk about great timing.