PSP: Out Tomorrow (in Japan). But does anyone care?

[Private Hudson]

Hey OB1, where are these reports stating longer battery life than initially thought? Yunno, those 5 - 6 hour things.. yeah.

[OB1]

Not longer than initially though, but much longer than what gamespot reported. The whole 90 minutes thing is simply impossible. If you look at ign's journal...

12:54AM: Status Report
- Battery remaining: 100%
- Full brightness time remaining: 5:49
- Low brightness time remaining: 7:35

12:54AM: Played Games
Ridge Racers, Vampire Chronicles, etc., using system speaker set to full blast and screen alternating between minimum and maximum settings (videos look better when the screen is set to minimum)

1:54AM: Stopped playing games

1:54AM: Status Report
- Battery remaining: 89%
- Full brightness time remaining: 4:52
- Low brightness time remaining: 6:21

You'll see that playing RR and Vampire Chronicles for an hour only used 11% of the battery life. That would leave the battery life at almost six hours per full charge. Assuming that RR sucks up more juice than the other games did, let's just assume that RR would have used up 12% of the battery life in one hour. That would put the battery life at around five hours, which would support what all of those individual gamers have reported with their imported PSPs on message boards like gaming-age (reputable posters).

[A Black Falcon]

http://psp.ign.com/articles/574/574557p1.html

IGN article about PSP battery life. Results? 3 hours 32 mins in Ridge Racers (running a race replay repeatedly to minimize UMD use) with speakers on and full brightness, 5 hours 9 minuites in Vampire Chronicles attract mode with headphones (to test a lower-impact game and the UMD), a negligable battery hit for having it in Standby mode for a day, 2 hours 26 mins in Ridge Racers WiFi mode (speakers on), and 10 hours 39 mins of screen-off MP3 play.

This does fall in with most of the other reports... that 90 mins from Gamespot is odd, but seems to be wrong. At its most taxing it seems to get a bit over 2 and a half hours (speakers and wifi on and full brightness).

That shows the impact of WiFi -- battery life dropped from 3:30 to 2:45. I'd be intrested to see what the impact of brightness is... that is how much the battery life goes up with lower brightness.

How does it end up? Better than I expected but still noticably worse than the GBA and even the DS. And far better with non-3d games and speakers (could add hours!). Bad? Depends on how you use it... more battery life is definitely better, but this is probably just high enough for most people to not care. Though Nintendo does have a sales point if they talk about how the DS gets noticably better battery life... but not as much of one as they would have liked for sure because the DS doesn't match the GBA either. Uh, so is the ultimate winner the GBA? :)

[OB1]

I'm really happy about the battery life. It's more than enough for me, someone who never plays games for more than a few hours in a row. And for those of you that do, well, you need to go outside once in a while.