The new Sony hardware revision is not publicly available yet, however reports from the E3 convention tend to confirm that it runs on the same firmware base as the PSP 1000/2000/3000. Namely, firmware 5.50.

The PSP Go will probably ship with a different revision, though. Unless firmware 5.50 already has a bluetooth driver integrated, which I doubt (but I haven’t looked at the firmware, so I can’t really tell).

Anyways, knowing the costs of developing an entire firmware from scratch, it is obvious that the PSP Go will share some code with its older sisters, since the hardware is pretty much the same. And if they share the code, they will share the bugs.

Assuming some hackers find exploits in the new firmwares, how easy would it be to adapt these exploits to the PSP Go? It’s hard to tell, but it will be easy to check when/if this happens. We’Ve seen with the Eggsploit that the vulnerabilty is a bit different between the PSP Phat and the PSP Slim. The difference was analyzed with PSPLink, and one file for each model was created. The PSP community was extremely lucky at that time, that the exploit for the slims(2000) worked on the lites(3000) as well. If it hadn’t been the case, there would have been no easy way to investigate the crash on a PSP3000 (it is not entirely true actually, help from people who had access to homebrew on the PSP3000 at that time – such as DAX or Miriam – would have solved the issue)

In other words, what led to the hack of the PSP3000 was the fact that we have access to debbuging tools on previous versions of the console, in addition to the similarities with the new model.
We can think it will be the same for the PSP Go: it would be financially bad for Sony to maintain different software on two revisions of the same console, especially one that has been out for 5 years.

So if an exploit is found on new firmwares, I believe it will be likely to work on the PSP Go as well. Even better, we know there are a few kernel exploits available in the PSP firmware, that were never publicly revealed, and therefore never patched (for example, joek’s exploit, that led to PSPGen’s Gripshift-CFW earlier this year). So If I wanted to play with words, I’d say the PSP Go has already been hacked 😀

But I wouldn’t hold my breath. If I were to buy a PSP today, I would probably get a Slim. I believe it’s the best bet nowadays (The Daxter packs are hackable with Pandora batteries), especially since all models run CFW now. But I think the PSP Go’s sexy… when it gets hacked, I can picture myself selling my PSP3000 and getting a PSP Go.

Oh, and for people expecting a hack of firmware 5.50. I personally hope, if such a hack is found, that it won’t be revealed before the PSP Go is out in stores 😉

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