Steve Levy’s piece in Newsweek is a real treat, and we can heartily recommend it. It may be a bit fluffy in places but it has some real nice tidbits:

“The pieces fell into place. Kutaragi worked over rough sketches with industrial designer Shinichi Ogasawara to craft a sexy-looking device that would definitely not be mistaken for a toy. “Our target user was not only kids but adults, people who will use music, video and other entertainment,” says Ogasawara. “And to make the size as small as possible.” One key component is the screen, with the same wide-aspect ratio as a high-end HDTV unit. “Its design says that this is the broader future of entertainment that you should be proud to carry,” says Andrew House, an American SCE exec. Another is the Universal Media Disk (UMD), a brand-new CD/DVD-like disk not much bigger than a silver dollar but dense enough to hold a whole movie. Some decisions seem obvious, like the inclusion of a —slot to handle Sony’s memory stick, a storage device that will let people move pictures and music from their computers to the PSP. (Though some will lament the absence of a hard-disk drive like the iPod has.) Others are trickier, like figuring out how to duplicate the functions of a game-console controller on something that won’t snag when you put it into your pocket. Thus the knoblike analog control on the PS2 is, on the PSP, a raised gutta-percha button that tilts in the direction you want to move.”