Wii | PSP turns five

Sony celebrates anniversary of its entry into handheld gaming, says 17 million systems sold in US since launch.

Five years ago today, Sony launched the PSP in North America, marking its first challenge to Nintendo's long-held dominance of the handheld market. While that dominance has been largely retained by the success of the DS, Sony has stolen a chunk of market share with the PSP and established itself as Nintendo's first viable competitor in the portable gaming space since the days of the Sega Game Gear.

Promoting the 2005 launch of the PSP, a less-than-portable display of the handheld hangs from a parking garage opposite Sony's (now closed) San Francisco PlayStation Store.

Sony marked the anniversary of its North American handheld debut today with a roundup of updated PSP stats. Most notably, the company said it has now sold more than 17 million PSP systems in the US, with a library of more than 520 games available on UMD and 300-plus downloadable through the PlayStation Network. The company's downloadable storefront offers more than just games, as Sony said there are more than 20,000 movies, TV shows, digital comics, and other original programming available on the service.

Like the DS, the PSP has seen a number of hardware iterations over the years. Two years after the original system launched, the lighter weight PSP-2000 arrived with a brighter screen. That version of the hardware was replaced in 2008 by the PSP-3000, which featured tweaks like a built-in microphone and an even brighter screen (too bright for some, as a matter of fact). The latest revision of the hardware was the most drastic, as last October's launch of the PSP Go featured a sliding screen, smaller form factor, and eliminated the system's UMD drive entirely so it could only play downloadable games.

PSP Go Video Unboxing

Source: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6254114.html