Some early adopters of Sony’s PSP are claiming serious build-quality issues with the portable game player, including buttons that can’t be fully depressed due to their position over the LCD screen, and discs that will eject themselves when the player itself is twisted. NFG Games has a surprisingly enjoyable write-up about some of the problems with the buttons, including this image of where the right-most D-pad button and the left-most, ‘square’ control button actually sit on top of the edges of the LCD panel inside, causing the buttons to actually hit (and sometimes scrape past) the edge of the panel—not a huge problem for the square button, they say, but a killer when trying to use the directional pad.
And while I speak a little of the international language of Humorous ASCII Art, a video found on a Japanese website best illustrates the issue of the ejecting PSP media, where just a slight twist to the case—something that can easily happen during a mildly rigorous (or sexy) game session—causes the UMD discs to pop up and out of the machine itself. To add injury to insult, the UMD are designed in such a way as to leave a stamp-sized portion of their spinning disc exposed to scratches—something almost guaranteed to happen if a rotating disc goes flying through the air.
No word from Sony yet, but just keep all this in mind before you drop $600 on an imported PSP. You might be acting as Sony’s Revision 1 Product Test Team.
