Buttons and Controls on the PSP

The PSP has the most buttons of any of the current portable games machines.

Two clear plastic shoulder buttons (A and B) rest under your index fingers when playing the games. They are also used to skip forwards and backawards one track when using the PSP as an MP3 player.

There are two sets of direction keys on the left hand side of the screen. There is a digital direction pad providing up, down, left and right buttons presses, and a single analogue ’sliding’ joystick. This means that the first person shooters on the PSP have to rely on usin the traditional four buttons on the right of the screen. The square, triangle, cross and circle are in the standard Playstation layout.

Along the base of the screen you have your secondary controls, which will generally always be available to you. The home button will bring you back to the main interface screen (if you are in a game, you’ll be asked if you want to exit the game first). Volume up and down is next, and while these will always change the audio, you might not always see the graphical representation of how loud your PSP is.

The rectangular button represents the screen, and a short press on the button will toggle the brightness of the screen. A long press will switch the screen off, but still have the PSP running - useful if you’re settling in to listen to a lot of music. Finally, the traditional select and start buttons are also present, finishing off the strip at the base of the screen.

Two switches are on opposite sides of the PSP, on the left (as you look at the screen) is a switch to active or deactivate the Wi-Fi circuitry on your PSP. Unless you have a pressing need to be connected, it’s best for your battery power to leave it off. On the right is the power switch, which also doubles as a key lock. A short slide upwards will either switch your PSP into standby mode, or switch it on. A long slide (and hold) will power the PSP completely down - switching it back on results in a full boot sequence. THink of this as the difference betweening putting a TV on standby or taking the plug out. Finally on this switch, sliding it down will cause it to hold in place - when down the key guard is on and no key presses will be registered until the switch is lifted back to the middle position.

And of course, the top of the PSP has a slide switch which opens the UMD disk drive door.