Games & gear forum: Which system should I buy?

My thoughts would be it sounds like you want something portable, and if you dislike the DSi, I don't think you'll fall in love with the 3DS. It's basically the DSi with some minor refinements and the 3D gimmick which appears to be like those old holograph baseball cards and what not. I expect that you'd be sorely disappointed with Netflix on a 3DS. It's a small, low resolution, display.

I don't know much about the Vita, except that Sony is replacing the UMD with a different proprietary memory card tech. I also seem to recall seeing somewhere that the battery life on it isn't all that great. Then again, if you're just going to be picking it up and playing for a few minutes here and there, battery life probably won't be a big issue.

The PSP isn't a bad system overall, but the UMD really crippled it. Not just in terms of performance, which was bad enough, but also because it was a proprietary format used ONLY by the PSP. It only had something like 1.8GB of storage, which isn't a lot for games. There's a reason the UMD movie idea flopped. Who wants to pay the same price, or more, for a lower quality version of a movie you can get on DVD with all the extras?

Sony's game division really seems to have lost its focus ever since the PS2. Now they can't quite decide if the PS3 is a movie player, game console, or slimline PC (I guess they did decide it's not that when they removed the Other OS feature). Now they're adding in all of this quasi-social networking garbage, and they're just trying to be too many things to too many different groups of people. Same issue with the Xbox 360, but the PSP and Vita (I would presume) as well. The PSP has all kinds of multimedia features, which are nice, but ultimately the thing is a game console. They even added some PSX emulation, which is also nice, except that the PSP really just doesn't have the necessary power to pull it off in a lot of cases. It was hampered by a bunch of crappy ports of PS2 games, and absolutely NOTHING I have seen in the past several years has given me ANY reason to believe that Sony's management has pulled it's collective head out of its arse. They seem to be so disconnected from reality, that you get these vastly over-engineered and expensive devices.

Despite that, the Vita may be your best bet going forward. That's where all the development is going to be focused looking to the future, though if you get a PSP there's a decent sized catalog of existing games which you could pick up cheap used at a place like GameStop.