PSP
Sony's widescreen handheld that made your backpack feel like contraband. The PSP played UMD games and movies, had actual graphics, and let you game or watch on the go—turning every school lunch period into a gaming session. It felt like the future until the future moved on.
The PlayStation Portable launched in Japan on December 12, 2004, and reached North America on March 24, 2005. With a widescreen 4.3-inch display and UMD (Universal Media Disc) — little optical discs in plastic shells that held both games and movies, the PSP was a quantum leap in mobile gaming power. Unlike the Game Boy's chunky sprites, the PSP delivered console-quality graphics in your pocket. Wi-Fi multiplayer meant you could actually play against friends wirelessly, and homebrew culture flourished around hacking and unofficial content.
For years, the PSP was the premium handheld—the device you saved allowance for, the one that made every other kid jealous when you pulled it out. Movies on a tiny screen felt luxurious. The hacking community kept the device alive with emulators and games. In 2014, Sony discontinued the hardware, but by then smartphones were already eating its lunch. Still, the PSP's reign defined mid-to-late 2000s portable gaming.
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Nintendo DS
The clamshell handheld that split gaming in two — literally. Nintendo's dual-screen DS added a touch-sensitive bottom screen and stylus, backward compatibility with Game Boy Advance cartridges, and era-defining hits like Nintendogs, Brain Age, and Mario Kart DS that proved touch controls weren't a gimmick.
![Video thumbnail — Playstation 9 - 2000 PS2 Commercial [High Quality]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NyvD_IC9QNw/maxresdefault.jpg)
PlayStation 2
The black rectangle that invaded living rooms worldwide as an affordable DVD player and happened to pack the best game library ever assembled. With over 155 million sold—the best-selling console of all time—the PlayStation 2 didn't just dominate gaming; it became the era's default home entertainment hub.
Game Boy
The grey brick: four AA batteries, a pea-green screen you had to angle toward a lamp, and Tetris in the box. It was outgunned on paper by every colour handheld it faced, and it buried all of them. Nintendo kept the line it started alive until 2003.
Game Boy Advance
Nintendo's 32-bit handheld released June 2001, with a landscape shape and full backward compatibility with the entire Game Boy and Game Boy Color library. The screen was notoriously hard to see until the GBA SP (2003) added a front-lit clamshell. Around 80 million sold across the GBA, SP, and Micro variants.