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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."
when this thing was first announced, there were a lot of naysayers, "Nintendo rules the market, and it's going to be hard to beat them." but these were some of the same comments that were being made in 1995 when the PSX was introduced. the specs on these thing are unbelievable.
the reason Sony does as well as it does in the videogame market is because it tries to find out what it's competitor does well, and improves upon it. I'm not saying this is going to be a GBA killer, (price is going to be a big factor) but it looks as if there is finally going to be a viable GBA competitor. (N-Gage eat your heart-out.)
but as we all know, it all comes down to software. personally, I'd love to be able to play Vice-City whenever and wherever I want.
Mike
So Sony say there new hand held console will have Playstation 2 level graphics?
Well after what they said about the Playstation 2 itself and its "Toy Story" graphics I would have to see it to believe it.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Does it have an OS?
I just need one more OS to reach the "21+ - We don't believe you." level of the latest poll...
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
I'll shit my pants if this thing costs less than 300 bucks.
7.1 channel Audio on a handheld? Why? Seems like this thing is just over engineered and will be a monster.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
a laptop.
It will require the user to lug around a car battery to run, and the 10,000 RPM disk drive will generate enough inertial warping fields such that turning a corner while walking will take major effort...
....you'll have to rebuy all your PS2 games you know and love, even though they'll be exactly the same on this.
Would it have been possible to make something that can take PS2 discs? I remember that portable PSX that guy made, it didn't seem too bad. Another idea would be to make a discman-like device you put in your pocket but it has a cable running to a screen/control pad thing. I saw a portable DVD player made by Sony at the Metreon last year based on that idea (although it was just a screen, no control pad).
I belong to the ______ generation.
7.1 audio on a handheld? With headphones like that, you'll look like a cyborg.
Dolby 7.1 audio....and one itty-bitty speaker!
While the PS2 may not have the best graphics out there, they should be fine for the size of screen this device will have.
Makes me think back to replaying Wolf 3D on the GBA, having a tiny screen sure helps make those low-res graphics more palatable...
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
... 7.1 channel Audio
Why?
It's a HANDHELD!!!
I can just imagine the proprietary headphone now... it's a wrap around band for your whole head, with a subwoofer on top.
Oh and the name... PSP?
I hate to say that this guy is already using the name....
Oh and in case I haven't karma whored enough?
Here's pics of the presentation
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Here is an article where this is all more clearly explained (and no Shift-JIS encoding, either):
http://pocket.ign.com/articles/430/430939p1.html
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Walkmans were around US$400 when first released.
Nah, no speakers. A set of headphones and a backpack-mounted subwoofer. Also doubles as a back massager, which you'll need due to carrying around the backpack-mounted subwoofer.
if the PSP is going to be successful it must be able to play PS1 and PS2 games. other companies have previously released more technically competent portables, but nintendo's strength lies in its VAST GB and GBA software library.
smd4985
sony needs -games- to compete with nintendo in the portable market.
whereas nintendo basically rolled over and gave up in the console market; the gameboy has fought off hoards of similarly impressive technical specifications.
sony needs a solid price, a solid lineup, and a good darn screen (properly lit the first time would be nice).
nice specs - but how about we hear a list of developers and games planned for the psp? or even the dimensions of the screen, or the battery life/recharge time?
after that 98% dip in revenue last quarter, it'll be interesting to see where sony puts its continued marketing force.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
No VGA port for external video, or internal DVD burner, or full-size keyboard??? How the hell am I supposed to get any work done on this thing?
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Check out the IGN article on the specs as well.
The device looks great, but how in the world will you power it all? Plus by including all the original buttons (although only one analog stick) this isn't going to be small by any means. This seems to be sized more like a micro laptop than anything else. However, using all the original controls lets them make it PSOne port friendly. In an ideal world you'd be able to rip PSOne cd's to this new format disc and just play them directly, but no way Sony would give up that much money in licensing.
Serious audio though, which hopefully will spur Nintendo to finally add dedicated audio hardware to future GBA's.
Impressive stats, we'll have to see how much they can deliver. But, hey, if they build a great portable with the same sort of size as my GBA SP, with a 10 hour battery, backlit screen, etc., I'd be glad to get one.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin
There's no way that this is meant to be used while playing games on the handheld. No sir.
As sony as mentioned, this will be an all in one media device. Let's compare it with somewhat similar media devices like the portable Archos video jukebox. It plays videos on a tiny little screen but you can plug it to your tv and enjoy the full experience.
My guess is that the PSP will have audio and video out to. Problem with 7.1 Audio is that you need an optical audio out cable, and it's not like many people even have 5.1 audio, or even receivers that have an easily accessible dolby digital input.
Anyhow, I am betting that this feature won't actually be used, they are probably just using Ps2 compatible hardware that's CAPABLE of processing 7.1 audio, but will not actually do it or output it. It's just ridiculous.
Something I've observed between Sony and Nintendo.
Playstation 2:
Plays DVD movies
Plays Audio CDs
Plays games
Gamecube:
Plays games
There are people who think that part of the reason why the Gamecube hasn't been doing so well is that it doesn't fill multiple niches. And after a *lot* of thought - I have to agree. If you're going to pay $150 for a game system, or $199 for a game/dvd player/cd player - which will you go for? I've often told people who ask me which console is the "best" that:
Playstation 2 has the most games.
Xbox has the nicest looking games.
Gamecube has the best games.
But - that's not enough. And if you look at the PSP versus Gameboy Advance, notice an interesting trend:
PSP:
Plays games
1.8 G cartridge - could play MPEG-4 movies (more than enough space for that + subtitle/language track at MPEG-4)
Plays music (again - at 1.8 G, more than enough space)
802.11 - can play games via network, possibly Internet
Playstation 2 graphics - I'll say "Playstation 1.5", which means that we could get Final Fantasy VII on the PSP (would not surprise me as a "launch title" - that would ensure a million sales right there), or Suikoden I & II Collectors PSP game
Gameboy Advance:
Plays games
Sony's may be more expensive, but if they get the price at around $150 (yeah, I'm stretching, but you never know), and if they start to offer movies, I can see myself getting one. Perfect for riding the train, flying on a long plane flight (and I don't have to pay the annoying $5 for a set of headphones), I can be sitting in the living room while my wife watches TV, my kids are playing at my feet, and I'm weeping as Aerith gets killed again. (Hey - I'm a sensitive guy!)
What will be interesting to see is what "other uses" Sony has for the PSP. Nintendo's "Connectivity" between the GBA/Gamecube has been pretty good at times (Zelda being the best, and at least the Metroid additions were worth buying both games). If Sony can play up the memory stick issue, you could have a game you could have 2 copies of - one for the road, when you get home, stick in the memory stick and play on the "big screen".
At least it's competition - and most of you know how much I like to see that happen.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Perhaps Sony can pull of a miracle and make this thing successful, but I think it'll be too much, too soon, for too much money and without enough software to challenge the GBA's expanding library.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
That's quite some time for Nintendo to get serious with its Gameboy.
Yea, because realistic weather has always been a challenge for game designers ... please, stop being a Sony fanboy. Sony's claims about the PS3 are *rediculous*.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
With specs like those, this PSP is guaranteed to be:
1) Only available in Japan, or
2) WAY too expensive
3) Hidden from the light of day forever. My nerd instincts tell me something like this is simply far too good to be true. And the sad thing is I don't need a justification other than that, and I'll probably still be right.
Erring on the side of pessimism with things like this is almost always the safe course to take. Why?
+++ATH0
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
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
there are FOUR lights!!
How often are GBAs dropped? Alot.
How often are GBAs given to young kids? Most of the time they are.
How often do young kids take care of thier stuff? Consider that I NEVER give my GBA to a young kid, and I cringe as I hand them a PS2 contoller...
Take this device that has a rotating optical media. Take it for a drop. Is the head still going to be aligned? If yes, repeat 200 times. You just simulated a weeks worth of use. Also, what parent is going to buy thier kids this thing? That's like sending your kid to school with a laptop.
PS2 quality graphics are nice, but when they're applied to such a tiny screen, who's going to be able to read anything?
Battery life? Consider that the day they release this thing is the day that Duracell and Energizer's stock split 3 times in one day.
I think they're missing the market.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Will this require headphones with 7 speakers and a subwoofer? Will I need to grow five more ears???
This side up.
Yes... but the dimension has more to do than the resolution, sincerely. If you have a screen the same size as a GBA but twice the resolution, it won't give any advantages for the type of games that are best to be played. I can't imagine play vice-city over a 3.5" per 2"... no matter what the resolution is. Worse is, if they have 3D graphics, I wonder what will be the quality of those graphics in small environment. Sprites are ok because you can draw them so that they are easy to see, but if the PSP doesn't include built-in anti-aliasing, then it will be the worst graphics ever seen on a handheld, at least for the first generation games/software.
Of Code And Men
One minute. It'll probably burn your hands too with the heat from a ps2 class graphics processor alone...
You may be right, however, "supporting" MP3 may just be a nice way of saying "we'll give you a way to apply our DRM to your MP3 so that it will work on our device". That's exactly what happened with the MiniDisc marketing literature. Go here (click on "Why NET MD" and then on "Supports Multiple Audio Formats"): http://www.sonystyle.com/intershoproot/eCS/Store/e n/imagesProducts/FlashDemo/flash.html
And, of course, they don't actually mean native support.
Very sneaky.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
I agree that this device is getting enourmous featurewise. I wonder if this is truely a handheld device as the media (and headline) says, or if its simply a portable ps2 just like the psOne, as the PlayStation Portable title suggests.
Given that, the psOne had a negligiable impact on the sales of the GBC or GBA. Very few people bought the psOne for its portability. But perhaps Sony is amending the mistakes that made this so by including a fliptop screen that was a popular bundle with the psOne.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
What an awful link in the article! I don't even mean it's awful because it's a Japanese link posted on the English slashdot site. It's awful because 99 percent of the gaming public would find it unintelligable (regardless of the language it's written in OR the primary language of the reader).
Honestly--I have an engineering degree and a fair bit of electronics knowledge under my belt and the stats made MY eyes glaze over. Dual MIPS4000 cores? 660nm laser diode to read a 60mm dual layer 1.8GB media disc? Hardware tesselator and surface mapper? Reconfigrable multi-channel sound DSP? Jeeeeezus who the hell cares (or even understands) besides the most hardcore geeks and hardware engineers in the videogame industry?
While all that is front and centre, why didn't the editors (of either ZDNet or Slashdot) include specs "real" people find important. What are the overall physical dimensions (not just screen size--and including the weight), amount of playing time from fully charged? How long can you play on a full charge? Can you toss in AA cells or does it use an expensive, cellphone-like battery pack? Are the discs enclosed in protective sleeves a-la 3.5" disks (being it will be used in a portable environment)? Can you connect it to an external monitor or television (I presume with "7.1" sound you could hitch it to your stereo being that 7-channel headphones or 7 tiny little speakers jammed in there would be silly)? How many and what games will be initially released?
Hell--there isn't even a picture of the damn thing! Even the folks making that "phantom" game box at least put a computer-generated mock-up out there! Is it going have a notebook-like "clamshell" design like Nintendo has moved to?
Until it's FULLY announced I consider this concept- or vapour-ware (ie. specs subject to change without notice--yes, even if it is from a big, rich outfit like Sony). I have my doubts about a product stuffed with so many processors, a mini laser disc player, USB, memory stick etc being practical from a price or portability standpoint.
I guess we'll see what chance it has when we REALLY get to see it at E3--it could be a great hit or it could merely be just small enough to slide into that shelf full of Betamax tapes that have been collecting dust for the past 15-20 years...
Just like the SUV doesn't compete in the same market as "trucks" or "station wagons," the SUV created it's own market. And unlike the in the car industry, the PSP and GBA will not be chasing the same dollars nearly as much.
In fact, there may instead be three classes here as the NGage seems to lie somewhere between the GBA and the PSP in terms of cost and capabilities.
Well, congratulations. You named one product in Sony's vast array of electronic innovation that has failed you; where I can tell you that I operated my PSX on the abusive environment of an aircraft carrier where it was played 24/7 (by day and night shifts), moved and manhandled on a regular basis without failing once in my ownership of the console.
Beyond your issues with that one product, I have to say that most of their electronics lines are very well made, from experience no less. I've owned at least three of their portable audio products and an array of headphones and the only times any of them have ever failed me was after I abused them in some extreme way (dropped from height onto a steel deck for instance). Sony isn't the only portable audio hardware I buy (price factors in), but it is on the short list of consideration.
Sorry, but Sony does produce great hardware in most cases. You seem to have run into problems, but considering the PSX and PS2 have been the best selling consoles world wide for over a decade now should clue you in to the fact they must be doing something right. A lot of something as a matter of fact.
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Just a minor revelation while speculating as to the PSP's size, but I'll bet the damn thing is a clamshell configuration. I figure the screen is the best indication of the unit's overall size, in this case a 16:9-format widescreen TFT LCD (480x272 pixels, 24-bit full color). Kinda beefy if you're thinking of a classic flat gameboy layout. There the PSP was looking not so portable.
:P
Then I remembered my trusty Sharp Wizard organizer that solves the problem nicely. My OZ-9500 (not pictured) is about 4x6 inches and sports a nice wide screen (16:9?). This would provide any gamer with acceptable portablility (albeit not pocket) without sacrificing screen size or hardware. There aren't too many other ways to configue the unit without giving it a large footprint...
Remember, you heard it here first
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