When new products hit the market, you usually expect early adopters to end up paying the most for them. The iPhone, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 all serve as examples of products that are now much cheaper than on launch day. However, when one of these receives a technical refresh or is replaced by a successor, it rarely comes with a price hike as well. That will not be the case with the PSP Go, which will be priced significantly higher than the current PSP-3000 at $250, despite dropping the expensive UMD drive in favor of cheap flash memory.

Why the increase? Joystiq might have the answer, with a short blurb from Andrew House of Sony explaining some of the justification. When prompted if the increase in price was related to R&D costs or if they were seeking to make retailers happy with a better markup, the answer was no to both questions. Instead, it was revealed that Sony believes there's a certain "premium" that gets attached to a product simply for the novelty factor; Sony will charge more for the PSP Go because they can.

Uncommon? Not at all. You can fire shots at any high-tech device and claim that customers were being overcharged in the beginning. If people are willing to pay the high price, the manufacturer will surely be willing to collect on it. If enough people got wind of such actions, though, you might see the number of early adopters dropping off - forcing manufacturers to drop their prices down to reality sooner rather than later.