Sony's Handhelds: Which PSP and Which Vita to Buy

Sony made two real handhelds, and both are better than their sales suggest. The PSP sold very well by any standard except Nintendo's. The Vita didn't, and it's become a cult favorite anyway, with a lovely screen and a library full of odd, great games.

The lineup

System	Released	Discontinued	Sold (about)	Screen
PSP	2004	2014	80 million or so	4.3 inches, 480 x 272
PS Vita	2011	2019	Around 15 million (Sony stopped reporting)	5 inches, 960 x 544, OLED on the first model
PlayStation Portal	2023	Current		8 inches, 1080p, streaming only

The PSP played games from UMD discs, little optical discs in a plastic shell, and it was close to PS2-level graphics in your hands. The Vita was closer to a PS3, with two analog sticks and touch panels on the front and back.

Every PSP

Model	What changed
PSP-1000 ("Fat")	The best-feeling build. No video out. The UMD drive is the part that wears
PSP-2000 ("Slim")	Lighter, a brighter screen, and video out added
PSP-3000	A better, less glary screen and a built-in microphone. Some people notice faint lines on the screen in motion
PSP Go (N1000)	No UMD drive, 16GB inside, digital games only
PSP Street (E1000)	A budget model with no Wi-Fi, sold in Europe

The 2000 or 3000 is the practical choice for most people. The Go is lovely and tiny, but a digital-only handheld whose store is gone is a hard thing to recommend unless you're modding it.

Every Vita

Model	What to know
PCH-1000	The OLED screen, deep blacks and rich color. The reason to own this model
PCH-2000 ("Slim")	An LCD instead, but lighter, with a longer battery life and micro-USB charging

If you care about the screen, it's the 1000. If you care about battery life and weight, the Slim.

Heads up

The Vita used Sony's own proprietary memory cards, small and absurdly expensive for their size. That's the thing everyone hated. An SD2Vita adapter, which fits in the game card slot and takes a microSD card, is effectively standard practice now, but it needs a modded Vita.

The store problem

The PSP's own on-device store shut down in 2016, and buying PSP games through the PS3 and Vita stores ended in 2021. Sony planned to close the Vita store that year too, then reversed that after the backlash, so the Vita store is still open for Vita games, but nobody's adding much to it.

The bigger issue is that a lot of digital-only games on both systems were never re-released anywhere. Once your console dies, they're gone, which is why backing up your own copies matters. I wrote up how I think about preserving my own collection.

Homebrew, briefly

• PSP: every model can run custom firmware. ARK-4 is the current option, following PRO.
• Vita: HENkaku or h-encore, then Ensō to make it stick through reboots. Adrenaline runs PSP games on the Vita, which is a nice way to have both libraries on one device with the better screen.

Tip

A modded Vita with an SD2Vita and Adrenaline is the popular way to play both libraries today: the Vita's screen and controls, both sets of games, and cheap microSD storage.

The Portal

The PlayStation Portal isn't really a handheld in the same sense. It streams games from a PS5 in the house (and now some from the cloud), and it can't play anything on its own. It's a lovely screen with a DualSense split around it, but it's a different kind of device from the PSP and Vita.

Nintendo's side of this is in the Game Boy to 3DS lineage, and the systems that fought them both and lost are in the handhelds that didn't win. If you'd rather play PSP games on something new, emulation handhelds by chipset covers which ones handle it.