OK, my kids love the idea of writing about their gadgets, so here’s another one: 12-year-old Patrick reviews his Sony PlayStation Portable handheld game console.

“I got my PSP in 2006. The first game I ever got was Daxter, one of the best games available for the PSP.

The first time I saw the PSP I thought the analog stick was a speaker. Well, it turns out that it’s not. The PSP is the first portable game system ever to have an analog stick on it. The analog stick is a huge upgrade from the D-pad. It really helps you move around better.

I didn’t expect the graphics to be very good, but I had my hopes. So, I loaded up Daxter; when I saw the in-game graphics, I just said “Wow.”

The graphics for the PSP are incredible. There exactly like the ones on the PlayStation 2 (PS2). I have many games and all of them have wonderful graphics. They look so life-like.

There were two things I wasn’t impressed at all by: The sound, and the brightness of the screen. Even with the sound all the way up it was hard to hear, but thankfully Sony fixed the problem by coming up with a sound enhancer. The screen is so dark there’s almost no way you can play it outside on a sunny day.

Sony has come out with the PSP slim, which is lighter, but still had some issues. With the new release of the PSP 3000, all the issues are fixed.

The battery life is very long; on one charge; it’s run for about 1 ½ days. The fact that you can store music, pics, videos, watch movies also impressed me.

I wish they would put a camera ability in there so you could take pictures. With the newest update you can get the PlayStation store, which you can get loads of demos from. You can also download games directly to your PSP. Online play isn’t very good, because you can only go online if you have Wi-Fi near you.

Overall, the PSP is a wonderful system. If you’re looking at handheld game systems, you should definitely get this instead of the Nintendo DS or Wii or something.”

Thanks, Patrick!