PSP: The Definitive Verdict (Page 4)

After two weeks of intensive handheld gaming, we offer a comprehensive and detailed review of PSP, along with an extensive photo shoot, all-new high quality videos, and market analysis.

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Pushing Useful Buttons

The front of the unit is also home to a set of useful buttons you'll often need quick access to. A tap of the Home button brings up the option to quit your current game, taking you back to the system's front end (which we discuss in more detail later).

PSP from the bottom, showing the Shortcuts.
The Home button takes you straight to the front-end

The volume control is self-explanatory, offering thirty levels of, er, volume. You have a brightness control which toggles between four settings with AC power, or just the lower three settings with battery power (still wonderfully bright, don't you worry). There's a mute button, which you must hold down to mute the sound and then press to un-mute, and then the obvious Start and Select buttons.

Need Some Sleep

On the right of the unit is the power switch, which comes in useful for turning the machine on. Seriously though: one of the most comforting aspects of the PSP we've encountered is the ability to put the machine in sleep mode. Even during the middle of gameplay, you can simply push the switch up once and let go (it springs back to position) and the machine will go into sleep mode, which uses very little battery power. Purely from a battery point of view, this mode drains so little that it's more effective to just put the unit in sleep mode than it is to fully turn off and then go through the full boot-up sequence.

PSP offers laptop-style sleep mode using the power switch

But if you do find yourself wanting to check that boot-up process (a video of which you can download below) again, or fiddle with the battery, you can turn the machine off by holding the switch up for a few seconds instead of flicking it. Given that the latter is a lot easier, we think most PSPs will spend their lives in this ever-useful powered down mode, thereby avoiding the whole disc-accessing and boot-up process, which can take up to a minute until you're up-and running in gameplay. Coming out of sleep modes takes less than a second. Whether on or off, the third, lowest position for this switch is a pretty gadget-standard 'Hold' position that locks the machine on or off to avoid any nasty mid-gameplay power accidents. Well, any not involving the battery life or UMD launching, at least.

UMD - and Those Faulty Units

In addition to the triggers, the top of the unit features the UMD eject button and the opening slot for UMD media, along with a small USB port in the middle, and IR receiver on the left. For all the fuss there has been surrounding the UMD media bay and worrying, reliable reports of UMD discs flying out of the bay during gameplay, we've had no trouble with ours, and this part of the unit feels sturdy enough.

The UMD slot, as smartass as it looks, is straightforward

When you insert a UMD disc you have to push it down until it clicks into place (pushing again clicks the disc back out) and then you close the tray. We have noticed however that if you push the tray into the machine slowly, the disc comes back out, which isn't reassuring, so you best push that tray in quickly. Issues like these are, of course, nitpicking, but given that this is first generation, ahem, Sony hardware, and as anyone who read our TGS write-up will be aware, we're a little paranoid at the slightest of Sony build issues, even if the machine has yet to disappoint us in any significant way.

Let's hope games don't pop out like this during play, eh?

Having said that though, while we haven't been a victim of the UMD-popping nightmare, we do have a couple of screen issues. Thankfully, they're so negligible that it actually took us a few hours to even notice them. There are tiny below-surface scratchings of some kind, as have been widely reported to exist in other units, but you only notice these when the screen is bright white. They look like tiny specs of dust that you can't brush away. On the other hand, there is actually one dead pixel in the lower middle of our unit, which is actually a lot less of a big deal than I had fretted it would be; for a start you only see it when the screen is predominantly black - during a loading screen for example - and never during any other conditions, and secondly, the pixels are so damn tiny that even in the black screen scenario, you have to look pretty damn hard to see it - it's not the same as a dead pixel on a laptop screen for example, since these feature significantly larger pixels than those of the pinpoint-sharp PSP display.

Continue Through Feature:

• Page 1: The Hardware Buzz, Hot Property
• Page 2: Two Weeks, Inside the Box, Build Quality
• Page 3: Secret Screen, Ergonomics, Triggers
• Page 4: Sleeping, Useful Buttons, Faulty Units
• Page 5: More on UMD, Make Some Noise
• Page 6: Thanks for the Memory, Battery Power
• Page 7: Full Whack Value Pack, Just Browsing
• Page 8: Movies and Music, Will You be My WiFi
• Page 9: It Plays Games Too - Performance
• Page 10: PSP vs DS, Final Thoughts

See also: Full Launch Report from Tokyo
               PSP Set for Launch in Japan
               PSP Launch Could be a Disaster