The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a developed and marketed by . It was first released in on December 12, 2004, in on March 24, 2005, and in on September 1, 2005, and is the first handheld installment in the line of consoles. As a it competed with the, Nintendo Ds
Development of the PSP was announced during , and the console was unveiled at a Sony press conference on May 11, 2004. 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 's , had failed. The PSP's advanced graphics capabilities made it a popular mobile entertainment device, which could connect to the and consoles, any computer with USB interface, other PSP systems, and the . The PSP also had a vast array of multimedia features such as video playback, and so has been considered a as well. The PSP is the only handheld console to use an optical disc format – (UMD) – as its primary storage medium; both games and movies have been released on the format.
The PSP was received positively by critics, and sold over 80 million units during its ten-year lifetime. Several models of the console were released, before the PSP line was succeeded by the , released in Japan in 2011 and worldwide a year later. The Vita has with PSP games that were released on the through the , which became the main method of purchasing PSP games after Sony shut down access to the store from the PSP on March 31, 2016. Hardware shipments of the PSP ended worldwide in 2014; production of UMDs ended when the last Japanese factory producing them closed in late 2016.
The PSP-2000, marketed in PAL countries as the "PSP Slim", is the first redesign of the PlayStation Portable. The PSP-2000 system is slimmer and lighter than the original PSP, reduced from 0.91 to 0.73 inches (23 to 18.6 mm) and from 9.87 to 6.66 ounces (280 to 189 g). At , Sony released information about a slimmer and lighter version for the device, which was first released in Hong Kong on August 30, 2007, in Europe on September 5, in North America on September 6, in South Korea on September 7, and in Australia on September 12. The UK release for the PSP 2000 was 14 September.
The serial port was modified to accommodate a new video-out feature, making it incompatible with older PSP remote controls. On the PSP-2000, games only output to external monitors and televisions in mode. Non-game video outputs work in either progressive or mode. USB charging was introduced and the D-Pad was raised in response to complaints of poor performance and the responsiveness of the buttons was improved.
Other changes include improved modules and , and a thinner, brighter screen. To improve the poor loading times of UMD games on the original PSP,the internal memory ( and ) was doubled from 32 MB to 64 MB, part of which now acting as a cache, also improving the web browser's performance.
