Geek and a Half

PlayStation Portable

October 2nd, 2005 by Jake

I need to really think up more creative titles…

Anyway, so, for awhile now, I’ve been iPod-less, which has bothered me because I love my music. But sometimes the radio just doesn’t cut it. So I bought a PSP. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s not the only reason I bought one. I also bought one becuase of all of the features it has.

I’ll go through each section explaining how kickass this thing is. First, the Photo section. You can stick .bmp, .jpg, .png, .tif(f), and .gif on there, zoom in and out, set a picture as a background (by the way, the PSP screen is 480×272), and rotate pictures. You can also send pictures to your friends with a PSP via WiFi.

The Video Section I’m a little unsure about at this point, I can’t get a video to play on my PSP as of now, not because it’s broken, but becuase I can’t encode any of my video files in MPEG4 Format. Besides, I only have 32MB of space on that thing, wouldn’t wanna waste it on a video when I can have music.

Ahh, yes, music. Where to begin? This thing has amazing capabilities for music. The built-in speakers are surprisingly good (for such a small device), and if you plug in headphones or even a 2.1 speaker system, it sounds unbelieveably good. (Of course, depending on the bitrate of the file, too) There’s also a mini-EQ on there, not customizable (at least now it isn’t), but there are 5 presets you can choose from. You can also listen to music on a UMD with or without music videos, as of Firmware 2.0.0.

I can’t tell you how the games really play, because I don’t have one yet. But rest assured I’ll let you know how the games play once I buy/rent one. I’ll probably get Lumines, becuase, hey, who doesn’t like Tetris?

Now for the best part: WiFi. As of Firmware 2.0.0, they included a web browser. That’s right, I can go around stealing internet from unprotected access points. Actually, it was funny, I was driving down a main suburban street, scanning for wireless every 100 feet or so, and random WAPs would pop up, even telling me what kind of encryption they had. We stopped at McDonalds and I actually surfed some sites while I had lunch. (Some McD’s have WiFi access from Waypoint Internet Services) I’m pretty sure my school has WiFi, so I’m gonna have some fun with that tomorrow. The web browser that’s included with it is actually really nice. I was able to connect to BigBlueBall.com’s vBulletin Forums and post a new thread. CSS displayed correctly, I think it even has minimal JavaScript support. You type things in like you would a cell phone, there’s a keypad that comes up whenever you need to type something in anywhere on the device. Once you get the hang of typing like that, you get pretty fast at it.

“I wanna see some pics!!!!!!” Okay, okay, keep your pants on, god. PSP Web Browser Pics.

When I bought the PSP it also came with: