I tend to do this each time I go on a trip in a plane. I sit there, one or two days prior, ponder how I would like to play with a new toy, and then proceed to waste a ton of money getting everything retail when I coulda just been smart and pre-ordered everything through the web. Two Christmases ago it was the Gameboy Advanced SP and this year it was a PSP. I, of course, did next to no research on it and dived in head first.
The first thing I noticed was how bright and shiny the LCD was; a kickass bright screen through and through. This, of course, started attracting fingerprints like no other becasue your fingers are totally on the shiny black areas whenever you play. The UI was very well designed as was having a lot of built-in functionality. One annoying thing was that I had to buy a memory card for it. I hate Sony's proprietary stuff, but you gotta eat it to mess with their gear.
VideoThe video playback was pretty descent. You have to use a few different software programs in order to shrink a DVD into a manageable size. You'll also need a 2GB memory card if you plan to store a good number of movies on the device.
SoundThe onboard speakers suck ass, use headphones.
MusicI put a bunch of MP3s on it prior to going on my trip. It did a good job playing them and it even had visualization options, like the ones Winamp and WMplayer has. The sucky thing was that I could not figure out a way to completely turn off the screen, so when I was sitting there listening to music, the system was totally wasting battery power by displaying stuff on the LCD. I, of course, dimmed the LCD's brightness factor, but it was still lame to be unable to black out the whole thing.
BatteryThe battery lasted a pretty long time; 5ish hours on pure gameplay mode?
WebThe fact that it had wifi and a web browser peaked my curiosity, but yeah, I was eventually disappointed. It was pretty slow and its real-world functionality had its limits; I would rather check things on my cell phone if given a choice.
GamesThere really aren't that many good games for this system. I played around 5 of them and they were all very mediocre; so mediocre that I would have rather read a book. The loading times for some of these games were horrendous. Do these developers know that it only takes a few seconds for a player to completely lose focus?
ConclusionIf you lived in a box and had no other forms of entertainment available, then by all means. But if you get your hands on anything else to entertain you, from a computer to a TV to a book to a magazine to a girl to people watching, then go do something else instead of buying and playing this. Unless some company pumps out a killer, must-play game, it's market share will disappear completely.