PlayStation Portable is amazing

I laughed when I heard that Sony's PlayStation Portable was going to debut with a $249 price tag, which is as much as you'd pay for any full-size game console and more than you'd pay for some. I guess I'd played one too many hard-to-see games on other handhelds made by competitors.

But after seven days with a PSP unit, I'm not laughing. I'm seriously impressed.

And I'm not that easy to please.

This is not the handheld gaming device you're used to. It's the one you've wished someone would make.

The digital picture quality is as good as anything you'll see anywhere. It is, frankly, amazing — the details clear and crisp, the color outstanding, the games rendered in 3D. The picture's every bit as good as that of the PS2 hooked up to my television.

The sound quality is truly unexpected — actual high-fidelity stereo quality. And although I have not yet viewed a movie on it, something that's possible thanks to releases in UMD format, I have no doubt when I get around to doing so, it will be a pleasure.

The PSP Value Pack went on sale March 24 and is loaded with goodies. Besides the unit itself, which includes a 32 MB Memory Stick Duo, it includes headphones with remote control, battery pack, AC adaptor, case and cleaning cloth, and a movie, game and music video sampler with some non-interactive game demos. The first million units also shipped with a UMD (more about this in a minute) video release of the movie Spider-Man 2 from Sony Pictures Entertainment.

There are some features I haven't even gotten around to checking out, including the fact that it will let you display digital photos and it supports digital music playback in both MP3 and ATRAC formats. All this in a unit that's smaller than a day planner. That means you can slip the equivalent of a full entertainment center into your backpack or purse and take it with you. It weights a mere .62 pounds.

But there's nothing scaled-down about the gaming experience itself on PSP.

The technical details are listed in the news releases: A 4.3-inch, 16:9 wide screen TFT LCD that displays 16.77 million colors on a 480-by-272 pixel high-resolution screen. It has built-in stereo speakers, exterior headphone connector and input/output connectors that include a USB 2.0 and Wi-Fi wireless LAN so users can connect to the Internet and play online on a wireless network, most likely with some sort of wireless fee.