I picked up a PSP at Target on Thursday. I had preordered one a month ago from PCConnection, but they apparently weren’t going to be able to get it out in anything like a timely fashion. Since I live in a town that’s big enough to have a couple stores getting shipments, but small enough that I wouldn’t have to fight my way through frothing masses, I strolled down to Target Thursday morning. As I was paying, they hit me with the usual “Would you like to apply for a Target card and save 10% on your purchase?” Why, yes, I would! I ended up not having to wait for shipping, and still got it for less than the list price. Sweet.

So, impressions: it’s a very polished, lovely piece of hardware. The reviews I’ve read have faulted its convergence features. This isn’t entirely fair, since the video/photo/music features on the unit itself are quite good; however, the software that runs on one’s computer to get those things into the PSP is still a weak point. The screen is outstanding, and the games are head and shoulders above anything else that’s out there in the portable arena. Kathy is already hooked on Lumines (and soundly beating my high scores by about 4x).

The one thing I find myself wanting until Sony adds more complete PDA-style features to the thing is a utility that will scan the Mac OS X Address Book and create a little JPG business card for each of the entries therein, allowing access to one’s contact info from the PSP. (Developers, feel free to hijack this idea — I’ve already sent it to the guy who makes iPSP, the third-party sync software for the Mac.) Making JPG renders of one’s iCal info would be great too, though more of a technical challenge than the Address Book integration would be.