Handheld gaming has come a long way since hecklerspray were kids. Back then, it was a cup attached to a ball by a bit of string, and if you didn’t bloody well like it was straight to bed with no pudding.

So reports of a release date for the latest for the handheld Playstation, the PSP, have got us more excited than a busload of Brownies going to a Mark Owen concert.

It’s been available in Japan since December, but finally Europe will be able to get their collective hands on a PSP from September 1st.

News has reached us that the price will be around the £180 mark. Not bad considering that it will come with a pouch, 32mb memory stick, battery pack, headphones, adapter, wrist strap, cloth and a sampler disc packed full of all sorts of media. Plus you get a free Spiderman 2 game if you register your PSP.

Most handhelds up until now have suffered from the problem of crap screens. And the rubbish add-on magnifying glasses and lights that never worked. Sony are promising "a 4.3-inch, 16:9 widescreen TFT LCD that displays full colour (16.77 million colours) on a 480 x 272 pixel high-resolution screen". That’s a good thing. We think.

The graphics will be comparable to the Playstation 2, plus you’ll be able to watch movies and listen to music on it as well. It’s like Sony are daring us never to do another second’s worth of work again in our lives.

What’s got us most knicker-wettingly excited, though, are all the multiplayer features that it comes with. You’ll be able to connect it to the internet in order to play games with fat Bulgarian girls you’ve never met, and then there’s wireless.

Up to 16 of you in the vicinity can wirelessly network up and play, or you can simply challenge that smug fool that sometimes sits opposite you on the train. It’s a long way from having a thick black wire joining two Gameboys together, although it does end the gaming strategy of yanking the cable so hard that your opponent drops their machine.

The only real competition to the PSP is the Nintendo DS, probably the most gimmicky games console in the history of the world. Listen, Nintendo, if we want to control something using a pen, we’ll do a crossword, OK?

Be one of the first to have a PSP – preorder one from Amazon.co.uk now

[story by Stuart Heritage]