Ten reasons to buy a PSP

Whenever I start showing (off), or talking about my/the PSP, I quickly find myself repeating the same features over and over in an attempt to make someone buy a PSP as well. So to make my life easier I now present: Ten reasons to buy a PSP or, "get your own" ;) 1. Pictures The PSP was always a great way to show your pictures to friends & family. No more dragging around large foto albums that can only cary so much pictures, just grab your PSP and you have al your albums at hand. Pictures aren't big in terms of disk space so you can place thousands of them on a 2GB memstick and still have plenty of room to spare. The PSP's 4.3" display is great for viewing fotos and if you need more detail you can always just zoom in and pan with the analog nub. You can also easily send your pictures to other PSP's over WiFi. And if you pop in a Go!Cam the PSP turns into a simple digital camera. True, 1.3 Megapixel (1280x960 at 24bpp) isn't a lot to write home about but for the price ($45 - $50) it's a good deal and makes your PSP experience a lot more fun. (Ohh, and the Go!Cam can film too, 480x272 at 30fps) As of firmware 3.70 it's also possible to play MP3's while you're viewing pictures. 2. Music The PSP can play MP3, AAC, ATRAC3 and WMV. So basicly it's all you need when you're on the road and want to listen music. It comes with a little remote control cable extension, which means you can just lock the PSP control and use the extension to switch music. The PSP Phat is only a little heavier than the avarage diskman, and the PSP Slim is 33% lighter... The unit will fit into most pockets. 3. Video When the PSP was launched, UMD Video was promoted as a major feature. UMD Video wasn't quite the success Sony hoped it would be, but what's interesting is the codec that Sony decided to use: H.264, aka AVC. Sure, the PSP also supports good old-fasion MP4 but the quality/size ratio of AVC is much and much better. With AVC you can fit a 90m movie into 400MB. AVC used to be very restricted on the PSP but with more recent firmwares Sony has decided to loosen the restrictions of AVC on the PSP. There are many free programs out there that make converting a video from DVD or from a file a breeze. The new PSP Slim even let's you watch your videos on the TV thanks to a TV-out connecter. 4. Games In the end, no matter how much features you load it with, at it's heart the PSP is still a handheld game console. There are loads of great games available for it and their graphic quality is on par with most that the PS2 can offer. Some games that deserve mentioning here: Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, Burnout Dominator, LocoRoco, and lot's more. Ohh and a Gran Turismo is still in the works. ;-) 5. Internet The PSP has a built-in WiFi adapter, so whenever there's a WiFi network available you can go and surf the internet. :) 6. Emulation Thank's to the homebrew community the PSP now has a range of emulators. Some notable ones: POPS (PlayStation, comes with the firmware and is unlocked using Dark-Alex' M-33) Daedalus (Nintendo 64) SnesPSP TYL (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) gpSP (Nintedo Game Boy Advance) RIN (Nintendo Game Boy Color) CPS2PSP (Capcom Play System 2) MVSPSP (Neo Geo MVS) Picodrive (Sega CD / Genesis) 7. GPS The GPS addon helps you never get lost again! 8. Easy Backup One of the things that a lot of people don't really think about, but can be of big importance in some cases, is the fact that you can easily backup the savegames of your PSP games through USB. Anyone who has ever lost a PS2 Memory Card with all their Final Fantasy savegames on it will understand how important this is. 9. Integration with the PS3 If you've got PS3, than you can watch and listen all the media you have stored on your PS3 on your PSP. This can be done through ad-hoc WiFi at home, or thanks to the LocationFree player which let's you play your media from any place on the earth. 10. Homebrew community There is a big and (mostly) friendly community of PSP users that like to create their own programs for the PSP. From calendar applications to a port of the Linux kernel. Anything you can imagine can be done thanks to these homebrew apps. Are there any great features here I forgot? Let me know...