The PSP is the only handheld console to use an optical disc format – Universal Media Disc (UMD) – as its primary storage medium. The PSP's advanced graphics capabilities made it a popular mobile entertainment device, which could connect to the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 consoles, computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh software, other PSP systems, and the Internet. The system was the most powerful portable console when it was introduced, and was the first real competitor of Nintendo's handheld consoles after many challengers, such as Nokia's N-Gage, had failed.
As a seventh generation console, the PSP primarily competed with the Nintendo DS.ĭevelopment of the PSP was announced during E3 2003, and the console was unveiled at a Sony press conference on May 11, 2004. It was first released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005, and in PAL regions on September 1, 2005, and is the first handheld installment in the PlayStation line of consoles. The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment.
