The PSP is getting on, it’s over 5 years old now and has sold well over 50 million units worldwide. The mainstay of the travelling gamer for the last number of years has been the PSP, boasting an impressive engine capable of games of a similar standard to the PS2 in a package that will fit in your pocket. But not alone is it a gaming machine it is also a MP3 and Video player. An all round little entertainment power house.

But it did have its draw backs. Its size and weight always meant you needed quite large pockets to carry it around in while useful on the plane or train it wasn’t much use to wear walking around town. The games came on disks called UMD that although quite small did require you to carry more stuff around with you. Also the internet browser was pretty useless it lacked power which meant that viewing normal WebPages was impossible. With no internal memory and the requirement for memory sticks to store your videos on added to the cost and limited its storage space.

So last year Sony set about giving the PSP a rebirth in the form of the PSP Go. The console has seen a number of redesigns and the PSP Go is the most radical yet. Next month sees the one year anniversary of its Launch so we are taking a look back at its first year to see how it’s holding up.

First of all let’s look at the major changes they made, you will notice straight away that the PSP Go got a lot smaller. It had been reduced in size and weight by almost a half when compared to the original PSP. The buttons that used to grace the side of the screen are now hidden under the screen which slides up to reveal them. The large battery pack is also gone in favour of a built in battery this allows for a further reduction in size and weight. It is now small light and sleek meaning you can carry it with ease as it’s not much bigger than your average mobile phone or MP4 player.  

The next main difference is that the UMB drive on the back got scrapped. All the games now must be downloaded from the Playstation network to the hard drive or carried on a memory stick on the older models. This has plusses and minuses it’s great that you no longer have to carry a pocket full of rattling disks with you as the hard drive can hold a good 10-20 games but on the minus side you no longer get an actual product when you shell out your money. No box art, no physical instruction booklet and the difference in cost can be dramatic. Because everything comes from PSN it removes the competition to drive down prices. At the time of writing this you can buy Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker for under 20euros on online stores in UMD form for the old PSP’s but to download it from the PSN still costs a staggering 39.99 euro. That means you can buy the same game and get an actual disk and box for 50% less than the digital download.  

Another big improvement is the power cable. Before you had to pack your cable which included a big black power block and two pieces of wire when you where off on your holidays to recharge the battery. This has been swapped with a small plug that attaches to the USB cable so you can recharge from the mains without carrying piles of old cables around with you. This is a massive plus as the amount of cables I pack for holidays are ridiculous with chargers for the PSP, the mobile phone, the digital camera and the laptop.