The new Sony Playstation Portable 2.00 firmware came out yesterday in Japan. This brought us quite a lot of new bug fixes, content updates and features for the Sony PSP hardware.

There’s a wide range of brand-new image and video formats now supported, wallpapers, themes, and the ability to transmit pictures wirelessly. All very cool features.

But these pale in comparison to the best feature of all.

A wireless web browser.

For some reason, even though the firmware was released in Japan only, it’s fully compatible with US PSPs with no apparent side effects. I installed the firmware update yesterday on my own PSP and I’ve had a chance to try out the web browser.

And holy hell, it rocks.

It’s a fully featured miniature browser built into the PSP. You can connect to a wireless internet connection from anywhere and view practically any website. It’s amazing. Here are the five key features it has that collectively blow me away.

1) Tabbed browsing. Like Firefox and Opera, you can open and navigate through multiple websites open at the same time that you can switch between. Just like task switching in Windows.

2) Java \ Javascript support. I can use GMail effortlessly to view, send and receive emails with absolutely no problems. It really, really works like a real browser would, except in the palm of your hand, from anywhere.

3) High resolution. The screen resolution is amazing, and the text and images are perfectly legible. No ghosting, even. You thought the PSP was good for games? It’s amazing for web browsing.

4) A mouse cursor. You can use the tiny analog stick to move a mouse cursor around the screen and to pan the view across a webpage to see everything. It’s extremely easy to use and highly intuitive.

5) Bookmarks. Yes, this even has bookmark support, like any normal browser would, except on a PSP, for free. :)

It also has history, a way to clear cache, delete cookies, etc. It’s absolutely fantastic and has rekindled my interest in the PSP once again. I’m going to carry it with me wherever I go for all my electronically converged needs.

Now, you may be wondering: How can I get my hands on this? Well, you can’t! I won’t tell you.

…

Okay, your pretty blue eyes won me over.

You can download the firmware update here:

Sony Playstation Portable firmware update version 2.00 (Japanese - WILL DISABLE HOMEBREW CONTENT)

And here are the instructions on installing the firmware:

Lik-Sang forums

Very simple, very straightforward, very fun. Just charge up your PSP to above 90%, pop out the UMD, plug it into the wall and run the updater. Ta-da!

Have fun! And buy Daxter when it comes out. :)