The PlayStation Portable (officially abbreviated PSP)
is a
handheld game console released and manufactured by
Sony Computer Entertainment. Its development was first
announced during
E3
2003, and it was officially unveiled on
May
11,
2004 at a Sony press conference before E3 2004. The system
was released in
Japan
on
December 12,
2004,
North America on
March 24,
2005
and in the
PAL region on
September 1,
2005.
It is the first handheld video game system to use an optical
disc format (Universal
Media Disc).
A new slimmer and lighter version of the PSP, appropriately titled Slim and Lite, was announced on July 11, 2007, during Sony's press conference at E3 2007. It was made available in the US, Europe and Japan in September 2007 with various colours and a very different box packaging to the original PSP. Among these versions, three were physically shown at E3 2007: a white version with a Star Wars imprint, a piano black version and an ice silver version.






