The PSP was a great handheld. I still whip mine out from time to time when I get a pang to play a few of the games on the actual system. It was about damn near perfect, with the exception of the overpriced undersized storage for it, SONY's proprietary memory sticks. I think for a 32 GB stick it was 80 or so USD when it was new. That was another point that hurt it, whereas the DS could use standard SD cards.
More people knew Nintendo was kid friendly, so it was safer for the kiddys to play it. I digress though. The PSP was a great system, and once the SD2PSP adapters hit, it more or less made the PSP a beast for gaming and emulation. And once it was jailbroken or modded, whatever you want to call it, it was great as a music player. Since smartphones were still ungodly pricey at that point in time (yeah, like they aren't overpriced now) but at that time you couldn't buy a half-decent knockoff smartphone for 20-30 bucks either. Yeah, the PSP is still a great little handheld, albeit long past its prime. (I really need to replace the analog stick on mine) I remember it likes to ghost drift.