Sony PSPgo (PSP GO) (16GB) Black Video Game Handheld System

Author's Rating:

Pros: Smaller, lightweight, fits in pocket

Cons: EXPENSIVE for both system and games, download only games, cannot use UMD's at all

The Bottom Line: 
I recommend buying a PSP 3000 instead of the PSPgo if you are looking to buy a PSP system.

Author's Review
While the Sony PSPgo looks great and is a beautiful machine, I feel it is a step down when comparing it to the features of the PSP 3000.

The system costs $249 at retail price and comes with the basic accessories needed to operate the system.  If you have previously owned a PSP you will find that you have to buy everything new.  Do not expect anything you previously own to work with this system, including the games you already have.  In comparison Nintendo's DS Lite costs $129 and the Nintendo DSi costs $169.99.  This system obviously comes at a premium price compared to competing portable game systems.

Lets first address the biggest flaw of this system, it does not work with currently available UMD games.  The system does not have a UMD drive, and while that makes the system ligher and more convienient to carry around, it means you cannot play games you already own if you have UMD games.  This would be a huge, huge problem for someone who owns a bunch of PSP games but just wants a system upgrade.  There is also no way to convert UMD games into digital format so you can play them on the new system, so don't even get your hopes up.

In order to buy games for this system, you have to buy them online through the Playstation store.  This is the only option you have for buying games for this system.  You will either have to enter a credit card or buy a playstation card from a store in order to download games.  I believe you also have to have wifi internet available to download games, so if you do not have wifi in your house, this will be a problem.  The game downloads are pretty big and are slow, so dowloading in a public place would be very impractical.

The PSP has a huge library of UMD games, however not all the games available on UMD are available on the Playstation store. So buy purchasing the PSPgo you are losing out on a whole bunch of the PSP's library.  The price of games on the PS store is either higher than the retail store price of a game or exactly the same.  There is no discount for downloading a game.  The retail price of a new PSP game is usually $39.99.  Games remain the same price on the PS Store forever, they do not go on sale or are discounted in any way.

Now when discussing the price of UMD PSP games, most PSP owners will know that these games drop in price over time.  There is also no buying a game used, or borrowing a game from a friend with the PSPgo. If you want to let a friend play your game, you would have to lend them your whole system and they would have to play it on that.  You also cannot resell games with the PSPgo, like you can with normal UMD games.  A lot of gamers fund their hobby by reselling games and then in turn buying new games with the money obtained from old ones.  This is not possible with the Go, once you buy a game you are stuck with it forever and the money is just gone.  So if you pay $39.99 on the PS Store for a download of Gran Turismo, there is no way to recover any of that money if you hate the game or just get bored of it after a while, the money is gone.

The PSPgo includes 16GB of flash memory, which is one of the few pros of this system.  This is plenty of memory to store at least a few games.  The memory is expandable, however memory cards from your old PSP will not work as the PSP Go uses a different type of memory.  This type of memory is still quite expensive compared to other options such as SD cards.  However you will probably not have to buy a memory card for a while with 16GB of memory built into the system.

The design of the PSPgo is quite good, but some people do not find it appealing especially those with larger hands.  Sony still has not added second analog stick to the system, so nothing changes with the controls from the previous system.  The system is basically a screen with a bottom layer, that you slide out to reveal the controls, when closed the screen is fully exposed.  The design is similar to many text-messaging phones out there.

The screen is 3.8 inches instead of 4.3 inches, so it is quite a bit smaller than the previous iterations of the PSP, which is something to take into consideration if you are a big fan of the larger screen on the PSP 3000 model.  The screen looks good and is very sharp and nice looking, no problems with the screen such as ghosting (which I have never actually experienced on an older PSP model before despite hearing many complaints about it).

Battery life, I would say its just average for this system.  The battery is built-in, so you cannot change it yourself. I do believe you CAN change it yourself if you have some technical know-how (I don't think its soldered in or anything like that), but finding a replacement battery may be somewhat difficult, and you definitely won't be able to obtain an official Sony one like you could with other PSP models.  Sony claims that the battery is not user-replaceable, so if you don't have very good techinical skills, you will have to mail the system into sony to have the battery changed once it goes.  Of course Sony charges for this service, it is not free.  This makes the PSPgo a truly disposable system.

If you have a PSP camera, it will not work with this system, neither will your old USB cables, chargers, cases or car chargers.  Your old memory cards will not work either.   You have to buy all this stuff new again if you want any accessories beyond what is included in the basic package.

This PSP, like other PSP systems also supports videos, photos and music and a web browser.  You can also use the 16GB of included memory for these functions.  There are some other functions in there like internet radio and new digital comics.  Overall though the specs of the inside of the PSP are pretty much the same as the older PSP models.  The web browser is painfully slow and basically un-usable and don't count on using anything with adobe flash on it either since it doesn't support flash (that means no online videos or youtube).  The PSPgo has the same amount of ram as other models so the web browser runes the same as older models.  You would think since its 2010 that Sony would at least give the web browser full funcationality and enough memory to function without constant memory low errors but no that is not the case.

If you are looking for a PSP, I cannot recommend this model. It costs $249, and the price of competing systems is a lot less.  Also you can buy a PSP 3000 bundle for $199 and usually get a game, memory stick and some other extras making the PSP 3000 a much better value than the PSPgo.  There are a variety of bundles out there to choose from for the PSP 3000.  Since the PSP 3000 is superior in every way except maybe the size of the system and built in memory of the PSPgo, I recommend purchasing the 3000 over the Go.