muelltonneWhy Everyone’s Picking Up a PSP Again in 2026
Look at it!
It just oozes cool. Ugh, I need to find mine in storage.
Funny how, in the PSP’s hayday, staring at a little glowing rectangle in public felt so awkward. And now it’s digital detox.
So I’ve started carrying this little guy around in public, as my “phone detox”:
And strangers approach me and ask “ohhh, what is that, a camera?" Like it’s alien technology they didn’t even know was an option. Same thing happens with my relative’s iPod, and I imagine a PSP would evoke a similar response.
I posit that people want dumb electronics. They want to be liberated from addictive smartphone slop. They just don’t realize it until they see it exists.
stargazingpenguinI found myself using my smartphone so little anymore that when it wore out I bought a Mudita Kompakt instead. It’s not quite to the level of a flip phone, (I wanted something that I could still read e-books on.) but I’m still amazed by how many comments I get on it when I have it out for something. The four or five days without charging is great!
Oh, that looks awesome. Bookmarking that.
It’s pretty great, as long as you’re willing to use it what it’s designed to do. I have it almost entirely stock other than adding a podcast app and a better notes app. The e-ink display is really nice for reading, and even though I prefer physical books, there are a lot of free e-books available!
Your mention of people commenting about your camera reminded me of it, because I’ve had the chance to talk to a lot of people about digital minimalism because of that. It seems I run into quite a number of people who are either fed up with the constant attention grabbing from their phone, or realize they have an addiction to it.
You’re selling me on it. It would make me carry a camera around even more.
I think my biggest issue would be banking, authentication, and a few “locked down” iOS-only apps.
Another is quick access to the camera for sharing, which I could do with the microSD slot or an external reader, I guess. But it’d be more clunky.
So I’d need to keep an iPhone around anyway, unfortunately. But I could certainly pare it down with some discipline.
Yeah, the banking and things like that probably wouldn’t work well or at all. My previous phones were all de-Googled android, and a lot of that type of thing didn’t work without Google Play Services. This phone is also a custom version of Android without the Google bits, so it would probably be the same issue.
The photo sharing I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of ideas on, other than what you mentioned. It is possible to add non Mudita apps, so you might be able to get a camera app working. I know the Olympus/OM Systems app (the camera brand I use) wouldn’t work on my other phones due to having the Google services stripped out of them though.
Man, I want to go back to an old flip phone so badly, but I drive around a lot in unfamiliar places for work so I need a GPS and also listen to audio books to keep awake so I’d prefer something to play those. I just wish there was one with some kind of map app so I don’t need to carry 3 separate devices around
There are actually some flip phones with Google Maps or alternatives available, but using it on that screen size could be a bit complicated! I remember looking at some of them when I was deciding on a new phone. A lot of them run on something called KaiOS, which is Linux based but not Android. They have their own app store of basic apps that can be used on it.