Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP)

Summary

The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a Sony handheld console. It is the company’s first attempt to gain a foothold in mobile game consoles, after Sony has been celebrating great success in home consoles with the PlayStation series since 1994.

In 2003, the PSP will be presented to the public for the first time at the E3 Video Games Fair and will finally be launched in Japan at the end of 2004 (US and European release will follow in spring and autumn 2005 respectively). The performance of the PSP is comparable to that of PlayStation 2. This makes the PSP technically superior to its main mobile competitor, the Nintendo DS. In the course of the years Sony releases several revised versions of the handheld and sold a total of 82 million devices.

The revised versions diverge among other things in design and were decidedly narrower (PSP 2000) than the original model or have a technically greatly improved display (PSP 3000). Finally Sony also releases the so-called PSP Go. This does not support the special UMD format (“Universal Media Disc”), which Sony established with the launch of the PlayStation Portable. Instead, titles for the PSP Go are available from an online store and are stored on an internal flash memory.

In comparison to competitor Nintendo, Sony is not trying to market the PSP as a mere handheld. Instead, the device is rather staged in the sense of a hybrid-like multimedia device: The PSP can be fed with Sony’s “Memory Stick” memory cards, can play feature films contained on UMD and offers its own Internet browser. In some regions, it is possible to equip the PSP with a TV tuner and use it in conjunction with a navigation software. At times, PSP players could download an application called Digital Comics Reader from PlayStation Store. So it was even possible to access digital comic versions of well-known series such as “Spider-Man”, “Fantastic Four” and “Transformers”.

Various special models in special colors and limited editions appear from the PSP. Some of these are bundled with certain games on the market. Among other things, a silver PSP will appear as part of the release of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core and a gold-colored PSP along with Monster Hunter Freedom. In the end, Sony supports the PlayStation Portable over a period of almost ten years and stops production in 2014.