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May 11, 2004 - To say that Sony's PlayStation Portable handheld system dominated the company's E3 2004 press conference would be an understatement. Officially unveiled approximately 20 minutes into the presentation, the new game system was a big hit with the crowd and finally answered several of questions that most of us have been asking in the year since the hardware was first announced.


Scheduled to be launched in Japan at the end of the year (North America and Europe get it in the spring of 2005), The PSP is available in PlayStation 2 black with a 16:9 widescreen TFT LCD display that boasts over 16.7 million colors and a resolution of 480x272. Dimensionally, its numbers are 170mm x 74mm x 23mm with a weight of 260 grams. Basic portable functions like built-in stereo speakers, exterior headphone connector, brightness control and sound mode selectors are among the lineup of features, and the buttons mirror that of a PlayStation 2 controller almost exactly (Square, Triangle, X, and Circle face buttons, a digital pad, start, select, and an analog thumb stick populate the face, with two shoulder buttons on the top).

Additionally, the new system comes standard with USB 2.0 and 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless LAN connectors that allow for multiple PSPs to be simultaneously connected to one another. Data and software can then be downloaded either by using the wireless LAN connections or through the use of a Memory Stick Pro Duo. The PSP also adopts the small high-capacity optical medium Universal Media Disc, the UMD. This format not only allows for 1.8 GB of space, it also provides an extremely versatile format for games, music, and video. The press conference demo showed off the trailer for Spider-Man 2 (the movie not the game) as well as Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children which is coming to both the DVD and UMD formats. To protect the content, a robust copyright protection system has been developed which utilizes a combination of a unique disc ID, a 128 bit AES encryption keys for the media, and individual ID for each PSP hardware unit.



Unfortunately, Sony did not announce a price point for the system so how much the unit will cost is still somewhat of a mystery. We expect officials to announce a more formal pricing structure at the upcoming ECTS or Tokyo Game show events; but we wouldn't mind if something a little meatier came down the pipeline before then. Click on our media page below to view the first official images from the system and stay tuned to IGNPSP for more throughout the day.

Quote:That's because they're always in your mind. This is objective fact.

Quote:E3 2004: Still No Battery Life Answers
How long will it last? How about 10 hours! How about 2 hours?!?
May 11, 2004 - Frankly, this one made a few of us livid -- this editor practically had to be held back by a fellow pressman from Game Informer Magazine upon hearing the otherwise-quite-likeable Sony Computer Entertainment of America CEO Kaz Hirai gloss over with abstractions one of the most important details regarding the PlayStation Portable. But despite the handheld's planned release being just a few months away for Japan and a little bit longer for its early 2005 release stateside, SCE was not ready to be firm yet regarding battery life for the PSP system.

Sticking to the rather vague notion of battery life being equivalent to "traditional portable electronic entertainment devices," Sony announced at E3 the equivalent of a gigantic shoulder shrug by giving only vague details of what that will mean instead of directly addressing what typical gameplay life will last. It's somewhere between 10 hours and 2 1/5 hours, that much we know. And have known, for months. Beyond that, it's kind of hazy, and we're not sure if that haze is the cloud drifting around in Sony's R&D office as they still nail down the specifics of the system (no PSP kiosks are expected to be playable on the E3 show floor), or if it's the vapor trail of rage that's streaming out of our eyeballs and nostrils.

Think we're kidding? Below is the exact quote Hirai gave regarding the lasting life of the handheld system.

"So, what is the battery life going to be on PlayStation Portable? It will be on par with traditional handheld systems, or approximately 10 hours. It is comparable to an ATC [ATRAC] portable music player, or approximately 8 hours. Or, it will be comparable to portable DVD players, which, in many cases, is about 2 and a half hours.
--Kaz Hirai, May 11, 2004

OK, now, first things first: do not pound on your monitor or computer in disbelief and frustration, for it will not help. If anything, smash your keyboard, for it is cheaper. But once the blood has drained from your steaming eyes, note that a look between the lines of this insanity, you will find a sliver of sense. Battery life will depend heavily on system usage, particularly in regards to the use of the UMD drive and the heavy use of the processor's power. When it comes to movies and music, these indications may be in line with expectations of what the system will actually deliver -- music tracks will not use the UMD much as the music files will quickly be dumped into memory so the disc can spin down, so it should be able to save considerable battery life in that area, and even high-end MP4 players end up, at best, with only a couple of hours of play (though, it should be said, most MP4 players we've come across have been HD-based, and since PDAs already drink batteries just running the OS, so it's tough to judge just what we should expect if media is off a Memory Stick or other medium.)

Also, you should know that, in the last few words of his speech, Kaz trailed off in a way that, if just for a second, sounded as if he was about to say in the middle of his well-rehearsed speech, "...which, in many cases, is about 2 and a half hours ... Wait, hold the phone, what am I saying?"



How much gas will GT4 guzzle?



The thing that troubles us, of course, is the gaming equivalency comparison -- do the math, because this does not compute. One could put gameplay expectations somewhere in between that 10 and 2 1/2 (although some could mistake it in the speech, Mr. Hirai did not mean to say that these numbers correspond with each function of PSP use -- they're just estimations of max life.) The problem is that even MP4 playback would use only a fraction of the PSP's power -- whereas the games we all like to play use it all, and then some -- and though many games are able to cache large amounts of data and leave the disc to spin down, streaming is the new way to go in the post-GTA world of expansive game design. Even at best, that would still mean a lot of sacrifices in the audio area alone just to play the simplest of expected titles (unless an in-game audio compression system is worked out to avoid typical realtime music load streaming.) Sure, maybe Bust A Move would be able to get up into the same 8 hours of gameplay that an MP3 player would drain off of the size battery included with the PSP (an 1,800 mAh Lithium), but if you're looking to play a handheld version of Gran Turismo 4 that is "...Not at all inferior to its PS2 counterpart," we're going to again guess that you had better stick near a socket.

Battery life has been a key concern to Sony since long before even committing to entering the portable business. In the past, Sony gave as its reason for not entering the portable arena after the success of PlayStation that the company was waiting for technology to be able to deliver the kind of cinematic gameplay revolutionized by the console at a reasonable expense and with an acceptable battery life. Most indications were that Sony was on the road to finally make that leap with technology behind them, but whispers from developers have contradicted that story -- one off-the-record insider comment told us in the early days of the system's progress that initial tests of hardware ran for less than an hour. That was, we assume, a stress test running unoptimized code and unusually draining applications, but it was indeed well into the system's development cycle -- the story came our way after developer kits were released to programming houses last Winter. E3 would have been the place to put fears to rest, but sadly, madly, and badly, Sony did not take the opportunity to explain better than that it'd either last long enough to hang with a GBA or else sputter out just after the ship goes down while you're watching Titanic.

Now that the PSP has been unveiled, we're hoping that developers will be able to whisper a little more loudly as far as their experiences working with the handheld hardware. Unfortunately, dev kits currently do not include running hardware, so there is not much to go on besides what Sony's told us so far, and if stories are to be believed, the saga is still ongoing as coders experiment with the immensely versatile processor clocking options to find the best compromise between wow and power. We'll keep up on the issue and keep you up on any news in this area.

(And by the by, of course I would not have throttled Kaz if I had not been held back upon hearing this non-news. But before security dragged me away, we might have had words...)
-- Nix: 165 Pounds of Fury

Quote:"So, what is the battery life going to be on PlayStation Portable? It will be on par with traditional handheld systems, or approximately 10 hours. It is comparable to an ATC [ATRAC] portable music player, or approximately 8 hours. Or, it will be comparable to portable DVD players, which, in many cases, is about 2 and a half hours.

Quote:IGN: What's the battery life for DS?

Perrin Kaplan: Very similar to the SP and I think very different from the PSP. I'm not quite sure why Sony said "Two to 10 hours" [for PSP's battery life]. That must mean that it's two hours.

Quote:IGN: What happened to Silicon Knights?

Perrin Kaplan: They are going to continue the business of what they do. We respect the work that they have done. They are a really, really good team. I just think Nintendo and Silicon Knights have slightly different priorities, which does happen in business quite frequently. But we have a lot of mutual respect for each other.

IGN: We just bumped into Denis Dyack, president of Silicon Knights, as he was on his way into a Nintendo meeting. So what kind of plot are you hatching?

Perrin Kaplan: There is nothing that precludes us from having a relationship. I mean, they may make a product for DS or otherwise. But it's just purely as a second-party -- that part of the relationship has changed.

Quote:IGN: What happened to Mario 128?

Perrin Kaplan: Miyamoto continues to work on a variety of different games and I think he's still got that in development, but he's just not ready to present it. He's got his attention on so many things and now with the DS coming he's just going to begin to finalize what he's working on. It has not disappeared, though, I'll just say that.

Quote:IGN: Are you aware of the Reggie-lution?

Perrin Kaplan: I might be part of the Reggie-lution. We have a lot of secret plans as far as the Reggie-lution is concerned. We conspire often. We conspire greatly. And just be careful because the flowers that bud around his feet are toxic.

Quote:IGN: The codename Revolution implies a new way to play games. Can we safely assume that this will be the case?

Perrin Kaplan: I think DS shows a new way to play games. The opportunities for that seem almost endless. Our hope and intent is to create something as unique as DS [with Revolution].

Quote:Perrin Kaplan: Very similar to the SP and I think very different from the PSP. I'm not quite sure why Sony said "Two to 10 hours" [for PSP's battery life]. That must mean that it's two hours.

Quote:[size=2]The D-pad is slightly loose and much taller than the one on GBA SP, and it’s lacking the characteristic depression in the center of the cross. Playing a free-roaming game like Super Mario 64x4 feels stodgy with a digital D-pad, and it makes me wish Nintendo had included a small analog joystick in addition to the digital controls.