PSP price: 19,800 YEN! ($185.48); battery life: 4-6 hours

[A Black Falcon]

Then I will never let this die, and will forever remind you of how wrong you were.

I could just remind you back with fifteen examples of you not admitting you were wrong about something, so it'd be foolish. :)


On the price subject... I thought of one more thing -- game prices. For both systems. What will the games cost? $30? $35? $40? $50? PSP games could be PS2-budget-level games, so they'll want to charge full price... but do people want to pay full price for handheld games? If we look at the GBA we can guess that a lot of them at least do not -- witness the early, failed, attempts to price games at $35 or above regularly (that is not counting stupid retailers that charge $35 anyway even though the MSRP is $30 for virtually all GBA games)...

Batteries.. yes, DJ, battery life has advanced. It just hasn't been moving at even a tiny fraction of the speed that power consumption has. So in reality batteries might as well be going nowhere... they are eeking out tiny amounts of more power while devices use many times more. So we get tiny, and shrinking, battery lives in new devices. Nothing we can do about this now. Just have to wait ... who knows how long... for major jumps in batteries... which may or may not be all that soon.

Two screens a gimmick? Kind of... but there IS a reason that it isn't one big screen. "Price". Ever heard of it? I am sure that it is a LOT more expensive to make those touchscreens! So they save quite a bit by having only one be a touchscreen. Also, a larger screen would cost more... two smaller ones is surely not as expensive to produce. So from that angle, there are definite advantages to the DS... of course it leaves it open to the PSP saying "look at my awesome massive screen and your small one", but that's life.

(My mother HATES her laptop entirely because the battery life is so poor she can't play Syberia 2 on the go for more than a few hours without needing a recharge. Wow, that was pretty applicable... The fact that the battery is only a small part of the technology didn't matter to her. For her, the whole system is one big thing, and any single component acting up destroys the worth of the whole thing, much in the same way as a flat tire destroys the worth of an entire car. Another "major flaw" is a plastic bit that broke off the ethernet port which means cables won't stay put without tape. Again, she doesn't care that it's "only a bit of plastic, look at all da powers of da system!", it's the fact that she has this huge hassle doing one of the two things she even wants the computer for, and really, that's a very honest way to see things. If you can't do what you wanted to do, it really doesn't matter that it's such a minor part that's getting in the way, you can't do it.)

Sounds a bit like what I've been saying in complaint to the DS not having an ethernet port at all... :)

Oh yeah, and in a final note, hmm... so OB1, you are predicting a 10% share for the PSP by the end of next year? Worldwide or in the US? After all you'd said I thought you meant more than that... that's something I could say could be possible...