"unveiled the sexy new PSP-3000"

You really need to get out more.

No? Well forget it then.

The terrible controls make the PSP very uncomfortable to play for long periods.

Still going to upgrade my old PSP to the Kratos special edition. So the screen's not a 3000 series, so what? It's got Kratos on the back! I'm a nerd - do you honestly think natural light is a problem?

Hopefully they'll do something about the viewing angle too. My Fat & Heavy PSP looks pretty poor if I tilt it up or down. Left and right are ok though.

Huh??

What ARE you on about? I've used the PSP plugged in on flights for well over ten hours. Apart from getting a very bad headache and neck ache (probably because I shirk the health warning of playing for 1 hour with 5 minute breaks), my large hands are fine and cramp free. An excellent choice for physical controls!

Suggest re-evaluating the way your hold your stick..

Mines the one with "Olympic Analogue Nub User" on it

new paint, a mic and a better backlight!

:(

here was me hoping for a reason to replace my ageing Mk1 PSP

So a slightly improved screen, and a mic.

I'm not sure that's worthy of a press release, let alone a whole new product and upping the product model number by 1000!

What are they paying the PSP design staff for?

Still not enough RAM to allow it to even load big web pages then? Shame really as it's nice for surfing over wi-fi. I'll stick with my PSP v1.0.

This isn't an update to the betterment of the PSP in any way. It's to lock out or try to anyway the huge swell of hackers who have gained access to the rom of the PSP allowing any firmware to be applied to it.

This then allows them to run games from the Memory stick rather than purchasing the UMD's.

They have no way of stopping it with the current one, god knows they've tried as the coders are in with boot batteries and memory sticks so unless a hardware change occured they couldn't stop it.

Hence the PSP 3000, new screen, mic ram........................ AND most important of all new hardware motherboard to stop the access to it's firmware.

Keep your old ones guy's dont waste your money on a Sony Security update.

The nub works surprisingly well. It's too bad there aren't two of them but I doubt there is any chance of PSP v1 ever supporting a second nub. The only annoyance is that the num can get bit tricky to control properly when it gets sweaty.

On the topic of the PSP as a whole. I really wonder what Sony is up to. Are they clueless or working on something top secret. The iPhone is stomping all over the mobile market and might even impact on mobile gaming too. I hope for Sony's sake they are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs and have a PSP2 / phone thing ready to launch by this time next year at the latest.

I haven't payed attention to the PSP for ages, so I'm out of the loop. Does the battery still last around 2 hours at best?

My only request before getting another would be to add a second "awful nub" - I hate playing games like Tenchu without a second analogue stick for view adjustments - it would make games a hell of alot easier.

Sony spend ages and vast sums of money obsessing over the screen, and yet keep the same awful control setup unchanged. It's almost as if they _want_ to cripple their customers' hands... could there be some nefarious motive behind this?

Agreed. Why can't the PSP can't use the RAM on the memory stick as cache memory? Yes, it's slower than the RAM on the system board, but this is web browsing over 802.11b we're talking about here, it's hardly going to be a bottleneck. Very annoying.

I get 5 hours gaming or movie watching out of my PSP2000, good enough for most flights.

I can get 12 hours of MP3 playback, as long as a turn the screen off (push and hold the display brighness button).

My only annoyance, is you can only charge via USB, when you put it into USB mode, which means there needs to be enough power in the battery to power it up. If you totally drain it, you have to charge it with the mains charger. It means if I go away, I either have to be careful, or take the PSU (which for some inexplicable reason has a fixed mains lead, and not a figure of 8 connector on it).

Come on, Sony. You promised TV output and other features for the original PSP that only the Slim has. Give us half of what we paid on your aborted bastard child towards this new one. Choads.

What a bunch of 'fish wife' whiners, you all are.

Nothing makes you happy, does it?

Good grief, some of you appear to think that a new revision of something should be a drastically different reworking. It's a revision people, not a new console.

As for reasons to get this. Hmmm, OK, perhaps the MB has a bit more security to prevent homebrew and...um stealing software. Oh wait, the freetards will want their emblem on that, let's call it pirating? Still to close to the nub? OK, taking/using without consent? There, factual and without emotion. Perfect.

No, apart from anything else, an enhanced screen is great, anti-reflective coating on the screen, also good. Wonder if the backlight and screen are more power efficient? Wonder if the chipset and processor eat less juice. I'd bet that the whole unit is a little more economical. Oh, look a microphone as well, so it will do Skype, and any games that want audio input will no doubt be possible now. Still the PSP is pretty much defined by the button layout of a standard Sony game controller and the size of the screen. I'd love to see how anyone else could redesign the PSP and come up with something that is relatively comfortable in your hands like the PSP is.

IIg wireless ethernet would have been a nice update without in any way hurting users of older PSPs.

Too many people got use to complaining about Sony on reflex, they've lost an semblance of objectivity.

Regarding batteries on the move, get a second battery, and/or a third party charger that doesn't require you to carry the PSU around. It's not exactly rocket science. Battery life is already pretty good I get 4-6 hours from a full charge on my PSP-2000 and about the same on the older PSP-1000. Perhaps the PSP-4000 will see an OLED screen with touchscreen capability and IIg networking.

recent propaganda for FF Agito XIII has been touting online co-op play; I'd been wondering how the hell that was going to work without even a keyboard for chat..

Quite frankly Sony are losing the plot on this one - I suspect most homebrew software enthusiasts will move over to the Pandora console [http://openpandora.org/] when it gets released. Anything they do that puts barriers in the way of modding the PSP will just push people to a device designed to be played about with.