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Sony PSP Hardware Completed
An anonymous reader writes "Sony CEO Ken Kutaragi has today announced that Sony has finished work on the Playstation Portable hardware, and the handheld is scheduled to be released later this year. No details have emerged on the pricing of the PSP, but Kutaragi stated that plans for movies on the UMD - the disc format the PSP will use , are now in the final stages."
On a related topic, Sony probably won't allow anyone to put anything on these UMD discs... but I know for a fact if I'm buying a handheld gaming system, I'm not going to put more money into a movie collection so I can watch them on the go.
I think they'll find that the majority of the market would agree with me as well. But I also say that as a guy who has no children.......
Karnal
Considering the supposed sweetspot for home consoles is around $200, I can't see this getting much takeup except for early adopters until mass production brings the price down..
at this point, we have a $300, oversized-yet-portable game player with 3 hour battery life, and the ability to play movies on a propietary format that you can't record to... don't worry though, i'm sure you'll be able to re-pay for the movies you own, so you can watch them for a few hours on the 3" screen before the battery dies...
all we need now is some kind of phone attachment, and sony can have their very own n-gage.
The lack of a price range announcement IS a price range announcement IMO. If the PSP was going to cost $200-$250, the price would have been announced already. Do you think that a $350 price announcement would help them at all against the DS? I think that Nintendo would benefit from that kind of announcement more than Sony.
Sony is not the kind to hide good news, in fact, they'll overhype anything they have. Remember the PS2 as a supercomputer claims?. From their actions we can guess that it's going to be at least twice as expensive as the DS.
They've already announced the PSP will have a MemoryStick slot and Sony already sells video recorders that record video onto those. So you can stop hoping and start complaining about Sony's stupid proprietary formats/lock-ins, etc..