Nerd Mentality

HARDWARE REVIEW - PSP Go

Posted October 15th 2009 by Will Davey.

Sony's most recent revision of the PSP, dubbed the PSP Go, has recently hit many retail stores around the world. With the removal of the UMD drive and the addition of a sliding screen, can the huge jump in price be justified? With the launch price of the PSP Go (£225 / $250) being closer to a new PS3 Slim (£250 / $299) than that of the PSP-3000 (£140 / $170), it can certainly be hard to recommend it over the current model.

Once you open up the packaging, you'll notice straight that it's a very sleek and attractive piece of equipment. When the Go was officially announced back at E3, I was very sceptical about the handheld. It looked like it would be awkward to hold, and overall I just didn't take to the design at all. That said, after seeing a couple of "hands-on impressions" videos, I took the plunge, and the product does in fact look and feel a lot better in my hands. Having had several different models of PSP since the original launched in the UK back in September 2005, the smaller form of the Go took a bit of getting used to. After a little under two weeks of use however, using the Go is completely natural, and my PSP-2000 already seems oddly large in comparison.

What's probably the most talked about issue with the console however, is that it doesn't have a UMD drive. This means that you'll have to download all of your games through the PlayStation Store (via a PS3, PC or the Store on the PSP Go itself), and these will be stored on the generous 16GB flash memory. With PSP games on average taking up around 1GB, you can easily get 10 games and a couple of films on there with memory to spare, which is obviously much easier than carry around just as many UMDs. However, if you currently own a PSP, your UMD games and movies will be rendered completely useless, so you'll have to buy your games again for the PSP Go. On top of that, with no competitive pricing on the Store, it's either the price they say or nothing, so in some situations you may find yourself paying over the odds for a game.

The biggest difference in this design revision, in terms of aesthetics, is the addition of a sliding screen. The screen on the PSP Go slides up to reveal the D-pad, face buttons and analogue stick, with the idea being that the large screen size could be kept whilst still making the overall form smaller. The screen itself is in fact half an inch smaller, but the quality of the screen hasn't been compromised at all. With the addition of a new "Colour Space" option, the colours on the screen appear noticeably more vivid than on the original PSP models. The analogue stick on the PSP Go, whilst smaller and in a different position, is arguably better as well. Again, it took a while to get used to, but the new analogue stick has much more resistance behind it, so I found making more accurate movements with it much easier. I did think that comfort might be brought into consideration when it came to using the Go for longer gaming sessions, but the new analogue stick hasn't caused any problems for me at all.

One new feature that has been added to the PSP Go is the "Pause Game" feature. This creates what is essentially a save state of the game you're currently playing, which is good for several reasons. First, if you need to quit right away and you can't find an in-game save point, use the pause game feature to create your own one. This save state will be kept no matter what you do; opening the web browser, watching a movie, playing a different game or even turning off the console won't interfere with the saved state. Load times are obviously considerably quicker when using the save state system, too. Monster Hunter Freedom Unite takes a little over a minute to get from the PSP Go menu to some gameplay. Loading the game from a save state though, only takes about 10 seconds, so even if you take the 10-15 seconds it takes to create the save state into account, it's still much quicker. That said, you can only have one save state at a time, so if you try to create another one in a different game, make sure you don't mind losing the current one.

Another small problem with the Go, though this is just me nitpicking, is that you can't check the battery information. On the original PSP models, you could check what your current battery level was in the system settings, and it would also give an approximation of how much longer it would last with a percentage and rough time in hours and minutes. This has been removed for the PSP Go, and instead the manual guides you through how you can estimate how much longer it will last. I shouldn't have to guess how much longer the battery will last, and I can't see why having a non-removable battery would mean that they would have to remove the feature. This won't matter to a lot of people, but for me, it was a useful feature that has now been removed. For the record though, concerning the battery, the life of the console is about the same as the PSP-3000.

Whether you should go out and buy a PSP Go will depend on several factors that I've mentioned in this article, such as pricing of games, smaller form factor, and the price of the console itself. The PSP-3000 is considerably cheaper than the PSP Go, and if you prefer to buy UMDs, then obviously the PSP-3000 is the choice for you. If however you want to bump the memory of your PSP-3000 up to 16GB so that you can store plenty of games, movies, etc., then that will set you back about £50 ($75) extra, totalling £190 (~$240). Not only that, but since launch, many retailers have dropped the price of the Go down to £200, so the price difference isn't so big after all. Overall, whilst I don't think the PSP Go is the best idea in the world, as a piece of hardware in its own right, it's very good indeed.

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Tags: PSP Go

Posted in: Tech, Reviews, Gaming

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