Ok, I was a bit naughty a couple of weeks ago, and traded up both my PSP S&L for a 3003, and my DS Lite for a DSi. I hate myself for being a sucker for these incremental iterations.

I'm not particularly a fanboy of either camp, so here's my fairly unbiased opinion on the two iterations:

PSP 3000 Series
This is one of those things where I just had to resign myself to accepting that I just wanted "to have the newest one". I use my psp for video as much as I do gaming to be honest, so I sold myself on the premise of having a screen that was easier to view when out and about.
***Actually, a re-occuring conversation thread about the PSP has always been "who is the PSP supposed to be for?". That's me actually, so I'll ping on a blog about that at some point in time.***
Anyway, I think my official opinion on the PSP 3000 is "meh..."

The screen certainly does have a more vivid colout pallete when the 'wide' colour profile is switched on, but I can't help but thinking that overall the screen is not actually as physically bright as the previous iteration. If you switch the colour setting back to normal, the first thing you notice is that the home screen colours look fairly washed out (way more so than on the 2000s), but once you play a game on it, it all seems to be just fine. With the 'wide' colour setting enabled, I do think the colours look more crisp (a bit more like watching something on a regular lcd tv). Oveall that's quite nice. I think this would particularly make an improvement to the picture you watch if you were to play something in a dark room - that's where the previous PSP screen always looked the most washed out me, it's not something I've got around to doing with the 3000 yet, but I can already tell there will be a distinct improvement.

As for the microphone, well, I'm not really bothered about that. I may use it for skype at some point in time - my dad retired out to Portugal, and it costs a bomb even to ring him on the landline (what kind of bomb? A giant one, of course - sorry), I just haven't been bothered to set up an account yet. In terms of game functionality, well you let me know if you hear of a title being developed to support it, and we'll worry about that then.

Overall, unless you play a lot of games late at night before going to sleep, I wouldn't really bother with it. The 2000 does everything this does, so unless you are a new purchaser, or have accidentally broken an older version wait and see what gets said at E3 (expect more 4000 than psp2 to be fair - oh god, I bet I buy that too).

A shoddy start to "The Year Of The Playstation".

DSi
Of the the two most recent handheld iterations, I'll be honest I was more interested in the PSP 3000s screen that the camera and music playback on the DSi. So why get one? Well since I asked, I'll answer that question:

1) I was straight up underwhelmed by the PSP 3000.

2) Chinatown Wars.

I'd been playing this on the DS Lite, and was overall enjoying the experience (must stop getting sidetracked by the drug trading, but that's another blog entirely). Anyway, right from the go when playing this on the DS Lite I was impressed by what they'd managed to shoehorn onto the platform. Much like the PSP versions they put out the game basically lays down the gauntlet in terms of what on open world experience can and in fact should be on a handheld platform. The thing was, that the top screen (where the action takes place) always felt very cramped. It had vaguely crossed my mind that this might look better on the slightly bigger screens of the DSi. Except they key word is SLIGHTLY. I wasn't originally prepared to buy a whole new system just so the one game that pushed the hardware looked 'a bit better'. I'd written it off on that basis. Until I played the level where you drive the tanker (high octaine dash or something like that). Then the system actually physically struggled to crunch everything it needed to process - it slowed down quite badly.

Anyway, that reminded me about what I'd managed to forget entirely - the DSi is a proper iteration, and actually roughly doubles the clock speed of the main processor, and gives it 4 times the memory.

So the next day, my DS Lite was cleaned up, boxed up and duly packed off to my local indie games retailer (Grainger Games represent) and I had my DSi.
Of the two, it was much easier to see the value in trading up to the DSi. Pictures and Music notwithstanding (I have a digital camera that's better, and a 32gb ipod touch for giantbombcast and what have you), there's the DSi Ware store - oh, actually nevermind.

Chinatown wars however was clearly designed with the DSi in mind. The difference between the Lite's 3" screens and the DSi's 3.25" looks insignificant on paper, but once you switch the thing on you couldn't go back. All of a sudden the top screen didn't look too cramped. The first thing I did on it was replay that tanker level, and it flew comparatively - I was actually aware of the physics put into the tanker and trailer rather than a sensation of swimming in syrup. It whips through the menus on the the DSi in comparison to the DS Lite.

Basically the DS as a wider platform has just become PC gaming. Chinatown wars has clearly been designed with the DSi in mind, but still using the DS Lite as the minimum spec benchmark to put it in PC terms.

That's basically the death knoll if you own a DS Lite. Basically Cinatown wars, pushing the old processer to its limits, is not fully taxing the new spec by definition. That gives developers more freedom in their game design that can push the platform to those often mentioned "DSi only" games. This could go one of two ways given Nintendo's recent track record - route 1 = Awesome Video Games, route 2 = bad mobile renditions of wii music to play on the bus.

Anyway, by the time the DSi Ware store properly gets up and running (I mean let's be honest, they might as well not have bothered with the initial efforts), with some old GBA, SNES, hell even NES ports (and megadrive ports?) the DSi shop could be fun.

All things considered the DSi is not just an iteration of the platform so much as it is an evolution of the platform. I've despaired of Nintendo's direction of late, and I'm ignoring those "A little bit of..." store titles as I say this, but:

Nintendo is officially +1 Cool Point in my book.

I just hope they don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again on this one.