For my birthday last month, Shea completely surprised me with a Sony PSP! Yes, its the PlayStation Portable. She kept telling me that the gift was from Bed, Bath, and Beyond just to throw me off. The gift was even wrapped in like 5 layers of concentric boxes to disguise it's size! For once Shea kept a secret from me... :)

So far, this thing has functioned perfectly. I picked up a few video UMDs for it while I was in Austin for Tiffany and Aaron's Wedding. I ended up with Season 1 & 2 of The Family Guy as well as The Fantastic Four, which Shea and I enjoyed on the plane back to Ft. Lauderdale. The video quality is great, although the built-in speakers are somewhat average. We used two sets of headphones using an adapter, but the total volume was on the low side when put up against the background noise of the airplane. The output volume of the PSP can't compare to the iPOD. Sony did include a nice feature that allows the user to boost the volume of UMDs a couple of notches in case the output is too low. I haven't played any MP3s yet so I don't know how the MP3 volume compares to the UMD volume althought I suspect they will be similar.

Shea hooked me up with the PSP value pack, which comes with headphones, wired remote, 32MB Memory Stick Duo, and lanyard. I did load up the Memory Stick with a bunch of photos and I found that the PSP has a very cool and slick looking interface for photo browsing. You can flip through pictures with the L and R buttons, and quicky zoom by holding Square and moving the analog stick. You can also set the wallpaper using any picture of your choice - including the current zoom and framing settings. This is an excellent feature and it allowed me to quickly set a portion of a photo as my PSP wallpaper - with no white space, no editing, practically no effort.

So what's up with this UMD stuff anyway? It stands for "Universal Media Disc" but it really means "proprietary format that allows Sony to line their pockets with boatloads of licensing fees." The disc is about 2.5" across and holds 1.8 gigs of data. Sony claims that UMD movies are DVD quality, but the lack of a TV output on the PSP and the smaller capacity of UMDs raises questions.

The built-in WiFi works great. I was able to get on my network at home quickly and surf the web with the integrated browser. The web browser is another area where Sony used their own technology instead of a third-party (and better) browser. While it works on most pages fine, some rendering issues cropped up on my GoText site and I had trouble browsing the pictures page due to "low memory." Ouch!

Maybe I'll get a game or two for this thing soon! Until then, I'll stick with the photos, videos, and web!