PSP 3000

Despite Sony's missteps, the Sony PSP is a great system, but in sheer spite of Sony's missteps, hackers are the ones who have made the PSP a great system. Although not as many as there should be for a system of the PSP's maturity, there's some excellent games available, but where the PSP shines is as portable emulation and homebrew device, and for that, Sony has less part than ever, consistently fighting against the same hackers and programmers who — if embraced — might have given Sony the leg up over the Nintendo DS.

So no shocks here: the recent release of the PSP-3000, aka the PSP Brite, is looking pretty hacker proof, with all its previous kernel holes patched up, preventing the installation of custom firmware and unsigned code. In particular, famous PSP hacker Dark Alex — who usually can turn around a new custom firmware within hours of an official Sony release — has made no progress worming his way into the PSP-Brite.

And that's ignoring the awful interlacing issue. There's still plenty of reason to buy a PSP, but not a PSP-3000. If you're looking to buy one and get the most out of your system, the PSP Slim or the PSP Phat is the way to go.