Launched in 2004, the PSP has established itself as the most desirable handheld games console on the market.

Released to the UK market in 2005, the PSP has won favour among customers looking for a more powerful system than the Nintendo DS, due largely to the superb multimedia capabilities of the PSP. 

The PSP is the first handheld console to use an optical disc format as its primary software format, known as UMD, or Universal Media Disc. PSP games are distributed in this format, as well as major Hollywood movies which can be viewed on the PSPs widescreen display.

A new version of the PSP was released in 2007, known as the PSP Slim and Lite. This new version has largely the same technical specifications as the original model, but is even smaller and lighter to carry about.

The PSP has also spawned a large homebrew community of hackers that have exploited loopholes in the firmware of the system to run their own custom software, e.g. emulators of other systems, small games and demos, etc.