Yes. We went and spent too much money on something that essentially is not a lot of different than the PSP 3000, but is new and shiny and cool. And hey, we make sacrifices for you. We truly do.

We picked up one of these bad boys today in our home town of Anchorage, AK, at the Best Buy there. We had a choice of White or Black, but a twitter follower (@starven) said his white PSP discolored easily, so we went old school and got the Piano Black version.

This thing has 802.11b (boo, where’s the n?), bluetooth (for what, we wonder? headsets?) and 16 Gigs of glorious built-in memory. This is the first of the PSPs we’ve bought (this would be our fourth) that we didn’t need to pay for overpriced crazy Memory Stick storage. You can put a Memory Stick in this baby, but it seems to only be the M2 (don’t quote us on that – this is only an unboxing, not a factual display of our awesomeness). The sticker on the box says free exclusive PSP Go Rockband unplugged, but @8bithack noticed that it’s a 5 song demo. Boo. We also got a code for a free Patapon 2 demo. Ugh.

The hardware is sweet. The form factor is small, and the slide up face is pretty darn shiny and exciting. When closed and powered on, there’s a pretty little analog clock that shows the time and date. Nice, useful, and very Sony. The gaming controls are a different than PSP 3000, as the analog stick is now left of center between the buttons and DPad . The power button is still in the same easily-slid place as the power button on the 3000, as is the wireless switch on the left. There’s still a place to connect it to a keychain or lanyard (does anyone actually do that?) to the left as well, near the WLan switch.

The power cord is new, as it adapts from AC to a USB cord that has a proprietary iphone-esque docking cable. While proprietary = bad, at least this cable can be pulled out of the AC brick and connected directly to the computer USB port, obviating the need for both a power and connector cable. Nice touch.

We’ll put this puppy through it’s paces over the next few weeks and hit you with an update then. Hopefully, some of the “WHRE”S THE UMD” complaints will be solved and more folks will get their hands on this expensive media / game player.

(Yeah, we know the photos are crap. They’re taken with an iPhone, which we figured would be like an ironic commentary on, like, the whole portable gamer thing.)