Specs for Sony PSP Handheld

doctor_no writes "Sony has announced the specs for its upcoming handheld gaming device, the PSP, at their PlayStation Meeting 2003. Most interesting is that this device promises Playstation 2 level graphics, a compact 1.8GB media, Wireless 802.11, USB 2.0, 7.1 channel Audio, and a 24bit 16x9 screen TFT LCD screen. Sony has called this device the 'Walkman for the 21st Century', and plans to allow the user to enjoy movies and music for the device, along with games. Full specs can be found at ZDNet Japan. The PSP will debut at next year's E3."

Comments

Re:my dear lord....

[56ker]

Just looking through the specs I'm sure the wireless LAN will be used a lot for multiplayer games. Having seen the popularity of Pokemon through a link cable - all they need now is a killer-app multiplayer game through the wireless connection and they'll sell like hot cakes!

Re:my dear lord....

[Ominous Coward]

Think about the room for the CD drive, the controls, the screen, the battery, and the ports. Suddenly you're quickly running out of room pretty fast. There's a certain amount of miniturization that's possible, but it took Nintendo about 10 years to shrink a SNES to Game Boy proportions, I don't think Sony can do the analogue in 4 years.

Sure, whatever

[mcc]

This is really, really cool. However: I seem to remember PS3 specs leaking out quite awhile ago... and then eventually changing to be marginally less impressive. I'll believe this when it comes to e3 next year. I have no doubt whatever Sony has at E3 next year will be rediculously impressive, of course; I'm just not going to listen to specs until they have a prototype working.

Now, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a thing called a Game Boy. The Game Boy was a complete and total hunk of junk. It had an unlit screen that displayed four shades of burnt yellow, unspeakably tinny sound, a limited processor, and limited ability to display large or numerous sprites at any given moment. After the Game Boy had been out a while, a couple of competitors were released: the Sega Whatsit, the Atari Lynx, and the Whatsit By Whoever Made the TurboGraphics 16. Now, these were really impressive little machines. They had lighted LCDs with bright, eye-catching colors. They had the ability to have large things moving. They had deep sound. The Sega handheld had a Sonic game that was almost as impressive as what you might find on the genesis at that time.

The Sega, Atari, and TG16 handhelds all crashed and burned violently, and the 4-shades-of-yellow hunk of junk went on to be one of the most successful video game consoles of all time. Why? Because everyone but the Game Boy tried to do too much. All the more powerful handhelds were bulky as hell, didn't fit in your hand or pocket as easily, cost twice as much (bad for something like a handheld, which is usually an impulse purchase), and most damning of all SUCKED BATTERIES LIKE THERE WAS NO TOMORROW. Meanwhile, the 4-color, dinky, tinny games for the gameboy just somehow wound up being really fun.

Now, is the point of me bringing this up to say that the PSP is going to crash and burn, or that I think Nintendo will crush Sony mercilessly because I am a nintendo fanboy and think Sony can do nothing good? No. Not at all. Sony is smart, and what they are describing is a kick-ass little machine. However, I do really have to wonder about what kinds of tradeoffs they're making to fit this in there-- because there WILL be some. How expensive is it going to be? Most importantly, how much *battery life* will this thing have?? I really have to wonder about the minidiscy optical drive; if ANYONE could pull off a CD-based handheld game system, it would be sony, but is that going to have any impact on the battery?

Basically the only reason i'm going on about all this is to counteract the inevitable group of people that (i'm guessing; there's probably like a hundred more comments in this story right now then there were when I started typing) are going to say this is going to be Nintendo's doom. Unless Sony does the x-box thing and dumps on the market to kill Nintendo, I don't quite think so. Better is not always better with handhelds, and in terms of Games, Sony has a rediculously uphill battle. The Game Boy game library is one of the biggest and best ever, rivalling even the PS1's, and the fact you can hop on ebay and get a bunch of dinky but fun gameboy-1 games for $5 a pop is nice. Moreover, Nintendo *really* understands how to build a good game library, the same way Sony *really* understands how to build gaming hardware. Sony is still mostly dependent on third-parties. And note that despite LOTS of talk about specs, Sony's said *nothing* about games. I predict that the first we hear about the GBA2, the first thing we're going to see, before we hear about polygons or anything else, is videos of games.

Here is my prediction: all the golden ages of video games have happened when there was healthy competition between two big consoles. Not like today, when the PS2 is all-owning and the other two are fighting over the "distant second" title; real, healthy competition. I think the PSP and the GBA/GBA2 (whenever and whatever that is; hopefully nintendo's been working on such a thing since well before the PSP announcement) are going to have one such healt