Must Have - or Must Wait? (Sony PSP Go)

Member Name: plipplop

Product:	Sony PSP Go
Date:	22/10/09 (194 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dinky, very portable, great design, no hard drive

Disadvantages: Limited games - and they're more expensive, the store isn't compatible with a Mac

If there's one thing you can be sure of EVERY Christmas without fail, it'll be that there's a new gadget that everyone wants and (very quickly) everywhere runs out of. This year, all the predictions are that this year's 'must have' gadget is going to be Sony's new handheld games console, the PSP Go! The Go replaces the standard PSP as Sony's flagship portable player and has some stiff competition from Nintendo with their new DSi.

So what's the draw for the PSP Go?

Well, for starters it's much more portable than the previous PSP console. It's slimmer, smaller, more compact and lighter and moves the market on leaps and bounds to become the most portable system you can currently buy. Don't necessarily believe the hype in its entirety; I still couldn't agree that this is pocket-sized, unless your definition of pockets is restricted entirely to 'very large ones on the side of a pair of cargo pants'. But the Go does fit snugly between two hands and seems to mimic the new generation of Nokia handsets that are designed in much the same way. The Go's biggest draw seems to be the new sliding concept. In essence, you slide the screen upwards to reveal all the controls underneath, making effective use of size and weight and greatly reducing the width of the console. The mechanism is smooth and simple. The Go doesn't feel as though it could break easily but neither does it feel clunky and hard to handle. It's a smooth, simple operation and gets the thumbs up from my large, clumsy fingers and me.

The screen is 3.8 inches across, and only marginally smaller than the previous PSP. Indeed, to really appreciate this, you'd have to line the two gadgets up against one another, so the compromise on screen space is negligible. The picture quality is better here, sharper and with a more vivid range of colours, particularly welcomed for the sort of puzzle games that I personally favour. A big downside for me is that you can't take the battery out anymore so you are dependant on having a power source for charging on the move, rather than the back up of a spare battery. With fairly heavy game play, I can get about 8-10 hours battery life out of this, so I guess it could cope with an average return train journey and maybe 1.5 flights.

The device is equipped with Bluetooth and can also connect wirelessly to your Internet Hub or similar to enable you to download games and other material. This is another crucial thing - the UMD format of the PSP is abandoned here solely in favour of electronic, downloaded games, which, again, helps with the weight of the console. It's reasonably easy to connect to a wireless device, no more or less so than your average laptop and is, of course, dependent on the strength of signal from the hub and the bandwidth of the connection. For the Go, the memory comes via an internal flash drive rather than a hard disk. This presents obvious advantages - bumps and knocks are far less likely to damage the memory, your battery will last longer, you can cope in more extreme temperatures and you've no risk from magnetic 'things' interfering with your hard disk. The downside is that you get less memory for your money and so here you get 16GB as standard (which you can't upgrade) but you can expand this with a memory stick. This is probably enough for around 10-12 games but, crucially, you need to back up to your memory stick to switch games around. I can't help thinking this is a problem to avid gamers, but for me this is more than enough - I never really have more than 1 or 2 games on the go anyway.

Committed PSP users will find the new button locations difficult to grasp. Key buttons like Home, Start and Select have all moved around and this is a situation where you probably need to decide to abandon one system in favour of the other. The buttons on the top include the volume control, which is a real pain during game play because your attention comes away from the screen. Once you've got used to this, it can work in your favour - games like LocoRoco, for example, lend themselves well to the unit but without experience of this on the PSP, I couldn't comment as to whether this is an improvement or not. Generally, the buttons and pads are a little smaller than the PSP, but still appropriately responsive and, overall, I prefer this to the old PSP. There are other improvements here too. The charger is comprised of a USB cable that clicks into a power plug. The same USB cable can be used to charge via a PC and is also the USB that you use to download games via a PC connection, all of which seems a fairly sensible use of resources. There's some stupid stuff as well, though. Accessories for the PSP like the camera attachment won't work with this, with Sony effectively forcing you to start all over again (remember none of your game discs will work either).

The software here is largely the same as the standard PSP. I never tried downloading to that console so can't really compare the two, but it seems reasonably slow to me. A 1.5GB film from iTunes takes me about 35-40 minutes at home; a game of smaller size takes, on average twice that. Factor in your own bandwidth connection for sure, but it seems to take a long time to me. Games must be purchased from the Sony Playstation store, which, crucially, needs to be downloaded onto a Windows PC. Yes, that's right; the Sony Store is completely inaccessible to anyone using a Mac. I got round this by setting up my account on a Windows PC and then downloading my content wirelessly through the handset but it still seems daft. It's not the only daft thing. It took me hours just to get the whole thing set up. The software disc supplied in the box was already out of date and, once downloaded, I had to download a second updated version. Once I'd sorted out my account, purchased something and got ready to download it, I then found that the console itself needed a software upgrade. About three hours later, my game was actually ready to play.

The menu on the console is reasonably straightforward to navigate (although my system memory shows as full without actually showing which games I have on the system). But wherever you need to key in words and numbers, you're taken to an interface that essentially enables you to key things in rather like texting on a mobile phone. It takes some getting used to, but does the job.

Pricewise, it's a rip-off. Currently retailing at £225 (there are already deals for less than £200) it's still more expensive than the previous PSP and not far off PS3 money and all that comes with it. But the worst thing is that with the console Sony are not passing on the savings from abandoning physical games. Most games in the Sony store are more expensive than their UMD counterparts on the high street (by 25-50%), and you don't even have the opportunity to trade in any more. It's pretty disgraceful that in cutting production costs, saving materials and protecting against piracy, Sony have actually decided to charge the customer more. There's also an extremely limited selection of games to choose from in the PSP store, nothing like the range you can get on disc, which makes no real sense at all. Certainly, if the volume of games doesn't increase rapidly, I can see many of these ending up on eBay come December 27th and two days of eager game play.

It's for this reason that I'm not sure the Go will take off. It looks great, feels fantastic and ticks all the gadget heads' boxes, but anyone with even the remotest concept of value for money will spot this as a bit of a Sony con. If you're happy to pay the premium for the console and maybe wait to see if the library rapidly increases in range and decreases in price, your investment might just pay off. But the technological advances probably don't offset the consumer negatives here and it's all a bit of turn off. My recommendation is to ignore those Christmas headlines and wait to see what happens to the PSP Go before you decide to invest in one.

Summary: A cute - but expensive - new little number from La Maison de Sony