While I'm not quite a Sony fangirl, I have generally preferred Sony's game consoles to the competition since I bought my PlayStation 2 in the first month of launch. The various PlayStations always seemed to have a bigger and better selection of games. Similarly, I'm not exactly a Mac addict, but my first computer was a Macintosh, and as soon as I bought a PC, I wished I hadn't. I'm now back in the Mac-using world and happier for it.
(Just for the record, I own four different Nintendo consoles and two handhelds, mostly for playing Zelda and Final Fantasy, and though I've never had a Microsoft console, I have owned a couple of Windows boxes that I used for gaming as much as for writing.)
A Brief History of Fascination
When the PSP was first announced, I was pretty excited. I still have one of the original "fat" PSP-1000 models, though it's my newer "slim" PSP-2000 that gets most of the use these days. I mostly use my PSP for gaming, but if you've read much on About PSP, you may have noticed that I’ve written a bit about the non-gaming things that a PSP can do. I've watched anime videos—both from a memory stick and from a UMD—while waiting for class, or just because it's easier to curl up in bed with a PSP than with a tv and dvd player. I've watched UMDs on my flatscreen tv using the PSP as a video player. I regularly use (though maybe I should put that in past tense) my PSP as a music player. I read comics on it, have occasionally browsed the web, and so on. If you read my review of the original PSP hardware, you'll see that these non-gaming abilities really make the PSP a better value than if it were simply a game handheld (but what a good game handheld it is).
I've also watched with interest the development of the iPod. Whether you like Apple or not, they always come up with interesting products and are champions of beautiful product design. While I liked the look of the first iPods, they didn't seem to me to offer anything I didn't already have with my PSP, plus my PSP can play games. They weren't really that much smaller than the PSP, and they didn't have a huge amount of memory. Why carry around several devices when one PSP could do it all?
The addition of video capabilities to the iPod made things a little more interesting, though the PSP has such a clear, crisp screen that it was still way ahead (not that I was really comparing the two devices at that point). What eventually caught my interest and made me think maybe I should have an iPod and a PSP was the tiny size of the iPod shuffle.
The biggest drawback about using the PSP as a music player for me has always been its size. It's small enough that if I just want something I can carry around in my bag while I listen on the bus, it's perfect. If, on the other hand, I want to be able to put it in my pocket while I'm in the darkroom developing photos or in the printshop printing, things become a bit awkward. I've got some pants with big pockets, and for a long time I just made do. But I kept looking at people with their tiny little iPods and thinking, "You know, that would be convenient."
Well, here's the real confession: I bought an iPod a couple of weeks ago. I now only rarely use my PSP to listen to music, though it continues to get considerable use for playing games (and not only because I need it to write articles for this site--I wouldn't have this job if I didn't love the work).
Next time I'll give you a closer look at what finally made me decide to buy the iPod, and what I think of it after a few weeks of use. Then I'll really put the PSP and the iPod (in its various forms) head to head and compare specs.
