Perhaps one of Sony’s best designed devices, the PSPgo is lightweight, compact, very stylish, and rests comfortably in your hands where the controls are finally where they should be – below the screen. Sliding the display upwards reveals them elegantly recessed into the bottom half. All black and accented by two metallic rings, the control panel feels grown-up, like a Bond gadget, leaving behind the durable toy esthetic that most game machines seem to have.

The PSPgo is a fresh start. Gone is the disc drive and any ability to play your old UMD game discs. In its place is 16 GB of flash memory which stores all of your content; games, music, photos, videos, and themes, into one single location. Gone is the need to ever “pack” your PSP, to choose which games to take with you or hunt down lost discs from empty game boxes. When the time comes to leave on a trip, you can merely grab your PSP and “go”, working out what to play later.

Since the first PSP was released in 2004, Sony has been slowly evolving the system with firmware updates, adding internet radio stations, a web browser, expanding the codecs for video and audio playback, and launching an online store for direct downloads of new content. In hindsight, it all seems to have been steps taken with the PSPgo in mind. Through the Wi-Fi connection it’s easy to connect to the PlayStationStore and now with a proper storage solution and the mix of free and for-purchase content in the store, you’ll find yourself spending more time visiting the PlayStation Network where it’s similar in experience to the PlayStation 3 and content tends to download and install in the same amount of time.

Enhancing this is the included Media Go software for Windows-based home computers. It’s a jukebox program that scans your media folders and automatically assembles a digital library of music, videos, photos, audiobooks, and podcasts that you can then drag-and-drop onto your PSP or Sony Ericsson phone. It acts as a direct portal to the PlayStation Store, but its best use is to convert file formats of the content you want to use into those supported by the PSP, a process that with most video files can take a long time, but so far has worked with all the DivX and Xvid videos I’ve thrown it.

Although the core experience is still the same, the slide-out design has allowed Sony to add a couple of tweaks. Turning on the system is as simple as sliding the display up. Closing it back puts the PSP into a sleep mode with a transparent, analog clock. Behind the clock face are is a fluid background that you can interact with using the shoulder buttons to send waves across the screen.

When you play videos or music, you can close down the screen to tuck the buttons away, using the shoulder buttons to quickly skip through tracks and a new PlayStation button to pause and view track listings. Buttons along the top, which become tucked away behind the screen when open, allow you to change volume, adjust screen brightness, and switch audio modes during headphone playback between “heavy”, “pops”, “jazz”, and “unique”. You still need to use the regular control buttons for finer controls, such as accessing specific video chapters or more precise jogging through content, but it helps make the PSP more portable in use.

If there’s one feature I was hoping Sony would find a new solution for it’s the hold button. Those big shoulder buttons make it far too easy to accidentally skip tracks when you use the PSP as an MP3 player, so you need to slide the power button downwards to lock off the controls. The problem I find is that when you want to unlock the controls, it’s all too easy to trigger the power button to turn the system off.

The display size is different, not as wide as on the previous PSP models, but taller. I haven’t experienced any issues with the content or the games I’ve played with, but then it’s likely a hint as to the decision behind the PSPgo’s most controversial change, the lack of backwards compatibility.

Not only is the UMD disc drive missing, but there’s no system in place to convert or play any of the older games you may own for the previous PSP systems. Limited only to the new digitally formatted games being released through the online PlayStation Store, the PSPgo becomes in a sense a next generation device, representing the kind of division that exists between the PS2 and PS4, without the leap in game quality. The same goes for memory sticks. The PSPgo can only accept the smaller Memory Stick Micro (M2) for use in expanding your memory storage or transferring content from devices. You’ll need an adaptor to use the smaller sticks with the larger ports on the older PSP and PS3 systems.

This means that current PSP owners cannot carry forward their investment, that for those who have already amassed a large library of games and memory sticks, buying the PSPgo becomes a very difficult decision, similar to purchasing an entirely new game system where you have to start all over.

For those who have waited the decision is an easy one as digital is clearly the future and the benefits it offers, of having all your content stored in the device itself, of being able to access the online world as easily as the offline, deliver a purely enjoyable experience and really is what the original PlayStation Portable concept was all about, the technology simply wasn’t ready yet.