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Portables (Games) Entertainment Games

Sony To Release PSP Handheld Console In 2004 362

Posted by simoniker from the very-big-deal dept.
JayBonci writes "According to News.com, in a news conference before this year's E3, Sony announced its plans to release a new gaming handheld called PSP, slated for release late next year. Presumably, this would be to compete against Nintendo's Gameboy Advance, a clear winner in the handhelds department for years now. The games come on a new media format, half the size of a CD or DVD, holding 1.8 gigs. Other Gameboy competitors such as the Neo-Geo Pocket Color have suffered from small game libraries and the inability to get over the GBC/GBA's entrenched marketshare. Despite all of this, Sony isn't SNK, and obviously has a lot of muscle to push its way to where it wants to be. It will be an interesting fight."
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Sony To Release PSP Handheld Console In 2004 More

Sony To Release PSP Handheld Console In 2004

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  • Sony also introduced a new accessory for the PlayStation 2, the I Toy. The USB camera will initially be used as a custom game controller

    How will this work?
    You jump up and down and little mario on the screen does the same?

    And I thought dance mats were scary.

  • Battery Life (Score:5, Interesting)

    by snitty ( 308387 ) * on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:28PM (#5950141) Homepage
    Ech, How long will two AA batteries run an optical drive and a color display with a backlight? My guess is about how long the Game Gear lasted on four AAs, a couple of hours.

    • Re:Battery Life (Score:5, Informative)

      by ryants ( 310088 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:34PM (#5950183)
      According to the actual press release [playstation.com], the battery will be a rechargable lithium-ion type battery, which means no need to buy batteries, as it seems it will be built in.

      • Re:Battery Life (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well, if I can't easily change/recharge batteries on a road trip/flight/train/etc, it damn well better last longer than a couple of hours. AAs are much easier to find and more portable than AC sockets.

        • Re:Battery Life (Score:3, Informative)

          by Cloud 9 ( 42467 )
          Well, if I can't easily change/recharge batteries on a road trip/flight/train/etc, it damn well better last longer than a couple of hours. AAs are much easier to find and more portable than AC sockets.

          Road trip: cigarette lighter socket.
          Flight: Accessory outlet
          train: Same

          You were saying?

          • Re:Battery Life (Score:2, Informative)

            by tc ( 93768 )
            Flight: Accessory outlet

            You've been lucky. Accessory outlets are still not available on all (or even most?) flights.

            • At least Amtrak Surfliners (Santa Barbara-San Diego CA) have plain old garden-variety 3-prong 120vac outlets everywhere. Easy to plug in your laptop and do anything you want, without worrying about battery life. I wonder how enjoyable wardriving is from a train...I think I may find out someday. :)

    • Re:Battery Life (Score:5, Funny)

      by seinman ( 463076 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:34PM (#5950189) Homepage Journal
      You got a Game Gear to run a couple of hours on four AA batteries? How? Mine wouldn't run at all on four, seeing as it needed six.

    • Re:Battery Life (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dylan Zimmerman ( 607218 ) <Bob_Zimmerman&myrealbox,com> on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:35PM (#5950193)
      The Game Gear used 6 AA batteries. I have one sitting right here in my room. It sure chewed through them quickly.

      Wouldn't it be kind of funny if this thing ended up being a PlayStation with a screen, integrated controller, and batteries? That's sure what it sounds like to me. Plus, if they designed it so that it could play PlayStation games that have been copied onto the little disks, then they would have a HUGE library of games already written for it. They would just have to burn them to little DVDs.
    • actually I think this is planned to use an InfoLithium battery, which should actually give it a pretty decent battery life.
    • To hell with that, how durable with those optical discs be? If it's a handheld, that means people will take it (and the games) places, which means a higher chance of being shoved into one's pocket, over-stuffed backpack, etc.
    • This is SONY you are talking about. If there is one thing they do right, it's battery life.

      My Sony CD player lasted 20 hours on 2AA batteries. Sony MiniDisc players last 100 hours on a single AA battery.

      Believe me, if anything, their battery times are going to kick ass.

  • better article (Score:5, Informative)

    by Professor_Quail ( 610443 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:30PM (#5950150) Homepage
    here's a better article [reuters.com]; it goes into a bit more detail than the posted one.

  • Games... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Iscariot_ ( 166362 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:30PM (#5950154)
    I wonder what companies they will team with to create new games. In order to beat Nintendo, they're really gonna need an awesome initial lineup of games. I'm thinking at least 25 or so. And they'll need some big named games as well, like Castlevania and whatnot.

    Also, what are they going to do to entice developers. Gameboy has such market penetration that it'll be hard to convince them that they can make more money with the new handheld. I expect to see a lot of games developed for both systems, or 3d ports of games for the PSP.

    • Re:Games... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cascino ( 454769 ) * on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:56PM (#5950365) Homepage
      I wonder what companies they will team with to create new games. In order to beat Nintendo, they're really gonna need an awesome initial lineup of games. I'm thinking at least 25 or so. And they'll need some big named games as well, like Castlevania and whatnot.
      Most likely the usual players. Sony has what I would consider to be as strong of a lineup of 3rd party developers (Square, Enix, Konami, EA, Rockstar) with big-name games (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Metal Gear, SSX, Grand Theft Auto) as any company out there. And that's not even mentioning in-house titles like Gran Turismo.
      Also, what are they going to do to entice developers
      16:9. 3d audio. 1.8 GB storage on 60mm discs. Real-time NURBS rendering. USB 2.0. Not to mention the 50 million+ PS2's already sold worldwide.
      How many MEGAbytes are GBA cartridges again?
      I think this new system is plenty enticing. Development kits are coming out in June, which gives developers 1.5 years to work with the architecture before release in Dec. 2004, at which point Nintendo will still have the GBA at the forefront of their portable lineup (remember, the original GB went virtually unmodified for almost 10 years).
      • Woohoo, high resolution textures (thats what all that storage is for right?) on a completely low resolution lcd screen! What a stupid concept. The GBA does it right, if you only have so many pixels to play with why bother using huge texture maps that just burn battery life? For the console market it makes sense but I don't think it does for the portable market, there's a reason the GB's have been the size they are, its what fits well into the average kids hands.
        • I can tell you're not a graphics developer. The stated screen resolution, at 480x272 is not so vastly lower than the 640x480 that the average console game outputs. And console games certainly do use fairly high resolution textures, and plenty of them. The constraining factor is not that making them higher resolution doesn't buy you anything, it's that you run out of memory.

          Anyway, depending on the game genre, the storage is just as likely to be for audio data or streaming videos as it is for graphics. For

      • Re:Games... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @10:05PM (#5951165) Homepage Journal
        How many MEGAbytes are GBA cartridges again?
        It's hard to be sure given that marketing departments don't know the difference between bits and bytes, but 64MB is about right. And that should be plenty for anyone not trying misdirect people away from their lack of content by using heaps of shiney pre-rendered video. As a collector, I still prefer the cartridge format. Wipeout 64 removed any lingering doubt I had about the cartridge being a limiting factor.

      • Re:Games... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Guppy06 ( 410832 )
        "How many MEGAbytes are GBA cartridges again?"

        I believe they're publishing 512 megabits as we speak, which pretty much translates into 64 MB. I wouldn't be surprised if they reach gigabit (128 MB) sizes in a year or so. However, consider:
        1. Bigger cartridges that conform to the old form-factor do not need new hardware to read. Cartridge prices don't go down like optical media because cartridge sizes are always growing
        2. Cartridges can also include hardware upgrades, such as additional RAM or even a GPU (Su
        • GBA carts are currently 8 Megabytes, max 64. Just like N64 carts. There are a few games that are 16 megabytes right now, but not many. Go check GBA ROM sites if you want proof.
      • I wouldn't be so sure about that claim about Nintendo. They said in the beginning that one of the reasons the GameCube uses the minidiscs is so that they can be used in a portable. The GameCube currently costs them about $100 to produce, and they've been toying with LCD screens for it for a few years. They could quite possibly release a portable version of the GameCube to compete.
  • The games come on a new media format, half the size of a CD or DVD, holding 1.8 gigs...
    wow, thats pretty incredible. i remember years ago when my dad bought me the original gameboy.... we had tetris, and that was awesome. now you have media and handheld systems that rival computers that were top of the line just a few years ago.....

    xao
    • It's an odd comparison to make, a game vs. the technology that runs games but it's probably more accurate than your post lets on.

      Regarless of the technical specs, it's still all about the games. If the games deliver, and it's not unreasonably priced, I'd bet that Sony will have an easy time selling them whether it's got two rubberbands and a paperclip or the latest and greatest portable electronics available inside.
      • you do make a good point....tetris delivered, and still does. a little while ago i dug up my olf gameboy and found i was still addicted to the game...

        xao

  • Competition is wonderful (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:33PM (#5950178)
    At least this will force Nintendo to compete with better technology rather than sticking us with ten year old graphics and sound.

  • GameCube format (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MhzJnky ( 443677 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:41PM (#5950244) Homepage
    The disk size and format (small DVD) sounds like the GameCube format. I beleve that format is a standard, like mini-CD.

    Wonder if this is a new format or if they are using that one. Don't see why they would roll there own with there's already one existing. Of course this is the same company that came up with Beta-Max and Mini Disk.
    • "The disk size and format (small DVD) sounds like the GameCube format. I beleve that format is a standard, like mini-CD.

      Wonder if this is a new format or if they are using that one. Don't see why they would roll there own with there's already one existing.
      "

      It probably is a new format as Nintendo co-developed it with another company who's name excapes me at the moment to be 'piracy proof'. Due to the probable IP involved, Sony'll probably have to re-invent the wheel here.

      There's some that feel that Nint
      • The media is basically 8cm DVD. I think the encryption is probably done in software.

  • portable format? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ugly colour scheme ( 673061 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:42PM (#5950245)
    The games come on a new media format, half the size of a CD or DVD, holding 1.8 gigs

    ----

    I sure hope their new format is solid state, because portable units are meant to be.. well.. portable. If it's a disk based format I doubt it will be nearly as durable as the cartridge based gameboy. Also battery time must be considered, if it's an optical disk the unit will not have a battery life nearly as long as the game boy advance.

    I have a feeling this system might suffer the problems as some early PDA's: overpowered, too expensive, and not portable enough. Nintendo and Palm both tackled their respective markets aiming for two goals: Portability and Efficiency. I hope sony realizes this before going against the behemoth of Nintendo's Gameboy.
  • anyone who has seen a gamecube disks knows what I meen The disks are small enough that if they could shrink the game cube down to palm size it will be one kick ass portible.

    on a more On topic note it says that it supports mpeg4 which makes you wonder if sony will come out with a burner that will let you burn you own movie disks, like thats going to happen, chances are sony will drop the mpeg4 deal for fear of possible lawsuits
  • Wasn't there one of these a while ago [com.com]? June 8, 2000. Did that ever materialize?

  • Nintendo reaction (Score:3, Informative)

    by spumoni_fettuccini ( 668603 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:47PM (#5950283) Journal
    They don't seem to be quaking in their boots. read this [yahoo.com]
  • I didn't see a price tag on the thing, but with all the cutting edge features, this doesn't look like an easy purchase for the kids, and I'm not sure that hardcore gamers want portability. Could be wrong, but methinks they may have some problems pushing Nintendo out.

  • lest we not forget.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Lynxpro ( 657990 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [orpxnyl]> on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:50PM (#5950320)
    ...the Atari Lynx, the world's first color handheld (and still the best!); the NEC TurboExpress; the Sega GameGear; and the Sega Nomad. Making a portable that uses optical media is asking for trouble. A proprietary SD memory card would be the better route for vibrations, although the media would be more expensive.
  • You think they'll just throw money at this thing until it eats into gameboys market share enough?

    The gameboy SP is pretty sweet from the little bit I played it. I'll be tough to beat. I do hope that Sony's media can take a beating.
  • "The games come on a new media format, half the size of a CD or DVD, holding 1.8 gigs."

    "And we do use the term 'new [216.239.57.104]' loosely..."

  • Whoa .... 1.8 gigs?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ignorant Aardvark ( 632408 ) * <cydeweys.gmail@com> on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:52PM (#5950334) Homepage Journal
    Wow, I forsee better uses for this thing than playing games. You can probably store 10 porno movies on it at the resolution of the LCD screen! It's a party in your pocket!
  • I find it amazing that consoles can use new storage technologies yet nobody has set about creating a small high capacity disc for music.

    A new audio format could use encryption, then CD could wither and die, no more RIAA whinging.
    • Screw a music-only disk. I want a small high capacity disc for data storage. Currently we have floppy (cheap but useless in regards of capacity/reliability) zip/ls120 disks (expensive for what you're getting) and CD/DVD (good capacity and cheap, but huge and somewhat fragile).

      Had Sony pushed the minidisc format for computer data by now we probably had gotten rid of floppies and zip disks. Minidiscs are small, hard do damage and cheap. Their capacity is nothing to write home about (140mb, IIRC), though.

      An

  • hrmph, whatever (Score:2, Insightful)

    by blisspix ( 463180 )
    I still have an original gameboy. I never saw the need to replace it. Tetris in colour? Who cares! I think the best games are the simplest ones. The game I played most on my Sega Megadrive was the rip-off of Tetris, I don't recall its name.

    This talk is making me nostalgic, I might go home and find my GB.
    • Yup, every game since Pong is basically a piece of crap.

      I find it really funny to see so many people on Slashdot talking about "classic" systems, and how "new" stuff is all crap.. .. forgetting of course that the "classic" system they're talking about is generally 10-20 years newer than some of the first home video games.

      And no, Gameboy was far from the first portable system. It was the first popular portable for the Nintendo generation.
  • Excellent a handheld version Paint Shop Pro?
  • I mean, the storage for a portable can't be a disc. They skip. Terribly. That, or the device would need an assload of expensive, high-quality RAM.

    What if you could have a USB converter to transfer the games from CD format to the solid-state media, a cartridge, or a storage module on the device itself (just plug in the PSP to the PS2). It could store a max of five or six games at any given time, and, as long as you have the disc, you can keep playing. Sure, I can already see the sorts of abuse that could br

  • Why the game boy works (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RsJtSu ( 569959 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:50PM (#5950664)
    The Game Boy was so successful because it let KIDS, hince the name Game BOY, play games in the car that were not hard. The cartridges last forever, I know because I found one recently from 88 and it still works. The amount of games available is insanly high as well. The game boy did not eat batteries like the game gear and neo geo did. Also, the games on the Game Boy were unique to it. You cannot buy many of the games for the Nintendo itself like you could for the Sega version. Sure, you can play Sonic The Hedgehog on the Game Gear, but you can play the same game on the Sega console. This is why the Game Boy worked so well.........probobly alot more reasons also, but these are some that people have already posted about.

    Additionally, I do not know why Sony is attempting to release an "all in one" portable machine that plays games, places calls, and serves as a PDA. That to me just seems like they are trying too hard to incorporate too many groups of people under the same device. If I want a PDA, I buy a PDA. If I want a cell phone, I buy a cell phone. I doubt there is a big market for people that want a cell phone/PDA/handheld game device. Why pay for this unless you want everything that comes with it? Just my $.02

    • It would seem to me that as the technologies become more and more similar we are going to see a lot more of this style of integration. With capacity prices dropping drastically, processing power increasing rapidly - why not have an "all in one" style system? Pop-in one of those 1.8GB disc's and wham, you have a PDA with all your appointments stored on the memory stick.

      Pop that out, pop in Zelda X, all your saved games also available on that memory stick. Run out of space on that stick? Run out and spend
      • It would seem to me that as the technologies become more and more similar we are going to see a lot more of this style of integration.

        Sure, but given the general suckiness of all the attempts so far, it seems that technology hasn't progressed quite far enough....

        In addition there are issue with interfaces -- a good interface for a cell phone isn't necessarily very good for playing games and vice-versa (note all the complaints about the ngage's excess of buttons and general fiddliness) Remember the old p
  • Shouldn't Sony's version of a Gameboy be called a "Playboy"? The synergy would be great, especially if you could use the same device to play GTA and look at Denise Richards' tits [worldsbestpickupline.com].

    GF
  • There is already a portable playstation and its cool as hell. Check it out! [classicgaming.com]
    I know its not quite the same but still. And this guy has made other cool units, like portable ataris and snes.

  • The system that would rock (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Davak ( 526912 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @09:16PM (#5950839) Homepage

    I want a portal gaming system that is similiar to the current mp3 player setup... except for games.

    Yes, iPod for games!

    Just USB or firewire the freaking games onto your gaming system. Sure I won't be able to get a GIG of information now... but come on! Size and jedi ninji graphics isn't the most important thing. Downloading is so more efficent than these little CDs or cartridges. You could even exchange games by connecting the gaming systems to each other.

    What would even rock more would be if they would release the SDK for free. Then you could have fresh shareware/freeware stuff to try all the time.

    Plus, you could have it play mp3, ogg, divx, whatever...

    I would drool to have this setup... I would equally drool to program such a device.

    Davak

  • UMD Pics (Score:5, Informative)

    by XBoyAdv ( 443706 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @10:50PM (#5951448) Homepage
    If you guys care, here is a webpage that shows pictures of the PSP's Universal Media Disc [gc-inside.com] that alleges to hold 1.8 GB.
  • And this will take the shelf space in the store video game sections that now hold what? Is something like this enough to send an existing system packing?

  • Portable Play Station (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LowellPorter ( 466257 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @11:24PM (#5951638) Journal
    Remember the Portable PlayStation [classicgaming.com]
    On Classic Gaming? This guy ripped apart a Playstation One and a mini-TV and built his own back in September of 1991. It was cool because the CD for it spun freely on the back of it without an enclosure. The builder of it even called it the PSP. Hmm... wonder if Sony "stole" the name for theirs from his sight? =)
  • Here is a picture from a Japanese site of PSP's 1.8GB media, it's looks to be around the same size as the Gamecube's disc, except it seems it'll come in a caddy of some sort (2.4in in size).

    http://www.gc-inside.com/news/103/10367.html

    http://www.gc-inside.com/media/psp/05.gif

    I for one am glad it'll come with Memorystick, being that there are already great Memorystick accesories such as digital camera, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 802.11b, and even a prototype TV tuner.

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