Seeing as Gamespot's hardware section seems to be broken in respect to user reviews, I'll post this here:

It does so much, and tries to do so much more...

There's not much point in me sitting and raving about how great the PSP is, theres plenty of other reviews that do that, so I'm going to ignore the games side of it totally and concentrate on everything else it does, and the things it tries to do.

One of the recent firmware updates added a web browser to the PSP, which for it's size works pretty darned well.  The joystick works as a mouse to move around the page, and you can scroll around the hyperlinks using the D-Pad.  If only it added streaming media too, it'd be perfect!  Sony have hyped "streaming media" support, but so far that only works from their own LocationFree(tm) base station - it'd be perfect if I could hook this thing up to a PC running Windows Media Services...

UMD movie playback is great, and theres applications out now that convert your .AVIs to MP4 format allowing you to run them from the memory stick.  This works out approximately 500MB for a 1hr 45m movie, so depending on compression and whatever else you might want to store on that stick, you may be getting that 1GB stick sooner than you'd thought you wanted to.

MP3 playback has been around on the PSP for a while, but another recent update has added .WMA files to the supported list (although you need a connection to the net *directly* from the PSP to enable this for the first time - you cant do it via a USB connection), so all of those CDs you ripped in Windows Media Player can now be downloaded for playback on the PSP.

At this rate, pretty soon the PSP will be intruding on the PDA market... if only they'd added a stylus...

Overall: 9.0