Ok. After playing one of my friends PSPs, and getting $100 in Best Buy certificates from the TV, I decided I could deal with getting a PSP for $150 real cash.

Game wise, the machine is damn fun. The launch titles ensure people have at least one game to grab, if not two or three. I myself got Wipeout, Twisted Metal and Lumines. All three have been great fun, with Lumines getting most of my attention on the puzzle mode. I'd like to pick up Mercury, but without the tilt sensor, it doesn't seem as fun as it could be.

Now, media wise, I'm not so impressed. Video quality of the Spiderman 2 movie included is very nice. However, media off the Memory Stick is not so nice. Seems Sony put in a 320x240 size limitation (or 368x208 for 16:9) on movies off the memory stick. So you end up seeing the unit upscale to the native 480x272. It also limits the video format. Off UMD, it can play Mpeg4 or H.264. Off the stick, Mpeg4 only. So a high retail price, and the do it yourself media options are crippled. And of course with no UMD-R or RW format, I'm stuck to the sticks only.

The photo viewer is ok for showing off pictures. I'm not sure if I can take my duo stick right out of my camera yet or not, still need to try that.

The MP3 player, well, it plays music, much like every other device under the sun these days. It it does so with no real amazing features. I'm holding an awesome LCD, and all it does is use a tiny fraction for the song info, and has no visualizers.

While the games are fun, I do still stand by my point that $250 is too much for this machine. It's odd that it launched in Japan at an equivelent price of $180. Guess Sony wanted to milk the US market a bit more, or anticipated the dollar continuing its drop against other world currency.

Sales wise, the PSP seems to be moving slower then expected. The only numbers are 500k in the first two days, and 600k over the first week. The DS did about the same on numbers both in the US and Europe when it was first released. Numbers from Japan at the end of 2004 showed the DS at 1.8mil and the PSP at 1.0mil there. Seems the lower price is helping the DS for now. Hard to say what the future holds, especially if the DS doesn't see any decently rated games soon.