SONY PSP 3000

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The PlayStation Portable is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005, and in PAL regions on September 1, 2005. The PSP is the first handheld installment in the PlayStation line of consoles. As a seventh generation console, it primarily competed with the Nintendo DS. Development of the PSP was announced during E3 2003, and the console was unveiled at a Sony press conference on May 11, 2004. The system is the most powerful portable console ever introduced, and it is the first real competitor of Nintendo's handheld consoles since many challengers like SNK's Neo Geo Pocket and Nokia's N-Gage had failed. The PSP's advanced graphics capabilities make it a popular mobile entertainment device that can connect to PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 consoles, computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh software, other PSP systems, and the Internet. The PSP is the only handheld console using an optical disc format – Universal Media Disc (UMD) – as its primary storage medium. The PSP was received positively by critics, and it 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 PlayStation Vita, which was released in Japan in 2011 and worldwide a year later. The Vita has backward compatibility with PSP games that were released on the PlayStation Network through the PlayStation Store, 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.