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PSP Battery Journal
ayersrj writes "The folks over at IGN have started a "Battery Journal" in an attempt to provide us with some relevant information regarding the battery life issue on the PSP in a realistic playing environment. The first run: a little under five hours with no wi-fi. Not too shabby."
...McGriddles did they consume in that same time span?
I'm happy with five hours, but people will still point out that the DS does better.
Why don't they make the batteries easy to swap out? This practice is not too popular (look at Pocket PCs), but it should stop the complaints.
I don't know what version of Paint Shop Pro you guys use, but mine does not need batteries. :)
I beg to differ. I don't want another device I have to remeber to charge every night if I want to use it the next day. My cell phone, palm, and laptop are enough.
link
PSP hit me again today. It says that its my fault that it gets so little battery life. If I would only learn to love it as it is. I just don't know.
Today the PSP saw me linking up to play with some friends. It burnt my hands and threw a CD at me. It says that I don't need friends. I should just be with it.
What have I done!? I couldn't take it anymore. I killed the PSP. I took it off teh wall jack, and played it till it passed out. Then I flushed it down the toilet... All I have to remember it by is the broken CD and a scar under my left eye.
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
With wifi, the battery life is variable, but it usually lasts just long enough to get through a particularly difficult quest in a game, but not quite long enough to save the game afterward.
It makes no sense not to. Maybe the one the PSP comes with is the most cost effective solution.
It would certainly be a Sony thing to sell a higher capacity battery for a nice markup.
Not that Nintendo's business practices are any better. Release a handheld with a terrible screen, then after everyone buys that, release a better version with features it should've had to begin with (minus the headphone jack), and then release a completely different handheld that's backwards compatible.
We'll probably end up seeing a "sleeker, smaller" version of the DS in about a year or so. And naturally, the consumers will happily rebuy it for $150.
Sony Sony Sony, havent you learned anything from Sega? Leave the handhelds to Nintendo.
Yes, why try to enter a market in which Sega failed to succeed ten years ago? It makes no sense at all to release a sleek, comparatively sized unit with extra features in a market that couldn't support the Game Gear ten years ago. I'm sure nothing has changed in the interim.
Notes: post was sarcastic, and I own a DS. I don't begrudge Sony for entering the market and think they do stand a chance at success, though probably not domination. Screenshots look very nice, and the price is surprisingly low for what it can do. I may end up with one eventually.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
Nintendo claims that the Nintendo DS can last about 10 hours before it needs to be charged. I don't know whether or not this is real-world performance. It'd be interesting to see what the battery life is when doing multiplayer, wireless gaming.
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infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Playing through Ridge Racers until the battery dies is probably not a good indication of how long the battery will last when you end up getting your PSP system and putting it to use for a variety of things.
Except, this is exactly the scenario I'd want tested when purchasing a portable device. I'd like to know if it will die on me when I'm flying from Los Angeles to New York. Hopefully they'll include this in future tests.
A while ago I stumbled across this site called Battery University, which has a lot of detailed information about how various kinds of batteries work and how best to make use of them. Not sure if this is relevant, but just wanted to toss that into the conversation.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
And with one of the features turned off too.
PSP (like NDS and GBA SP) uses an internal rechargable battery. That means you can't replace the battery when it gets low, you need a power outlet and time to recharge. The old Gameboy (Pocket) offered about 8-9 on replacable AAAs. Gameboy Advance was near 14 hours (or about 9-10 using the rechargable battery pack).
Didn't anyone (at Sony) learn anything from Gamegear vs Gameboy? It didn't matter if your system was a monochrome sub-NES powered unit with a bezel speaker, it could still beat a full color portable that didn't give a full days use out of a charge. I'd say mistake #1 was even considering optical (mechanically read) media. Unless the whole dual screen/touch screen gamble flops, PSP will be going the same way as the Gamegear, in exactly the same way (large, high powered but battery killing unit that is mostly filled with ports from its larger brother)
Apparently depending on the game, the battery life can be HORRID. Simply grahic games can go for 5 or so hours with no WiFi turned on... more graphically intense games? Ridge Racers goes for 90 mins-3 hours, depending on screen brightness and speaker use.
90 minutes!!! Next Sony will be selling protable generators to carry on your back when taking your PSP and graphically intesnive games around with you (Metal Gear Ac!d, Gran Turismo, Ridge Racers, etc.).
[sarcasm]Yep, looks like IGN is right, as always...[/sarcasm]
Of course Gamespot says the battery life is a bit more variable than that.
For those not playing at home IGN has had some incredibly biased coverage in this recent round of handheld launches going so far as to "talk down" about the Nintendo DS on the actual DS portion of IGN. While both portable gaming systems kick ass, they do it in different ways, the rampant fanboyism at IGN is somewhat sickening, especially given than when it was first started, way back as Next Generation and even before then when the site was run off a college server it was known to being one of the first gaming sites to push honest opinions.
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I love this journal. First, they decide to give you times in American West Coast (PST) for no reason, as they're in japan, and time of day here matters not to anyone when the test is taking place in day/night conditions in japan. Could someone post the article but translate the times to Japan time, so that their actions make sense logically?
Also, they've made a few, how do you say, mistakes?
That part sure confused me.
For context, click Parent.
Heh, I know it's a joke, but TFA does mention that much like Apple laptops(don't know if others do this as well, probably do) if the battery level drops below a certain point, the PSP will put itself to sleep, allowing you to resume your adventures provided you charge it within a reasonable amount of time.
Monstar L
7:45AM: Stopped playing games Realized that you don't actually control mechs in Armored Core, so decided to stop playing.
:)
yeah that about summed up armored core for everyone else to
http://ukresistance.co.uk/e .jpg
I love the people packing around the car batteries to be able to use their PSP's hah.
direct link to images:
http://ukresistance.co.uk/pics2/pspbattery.jpg
http://ukresistance.co.uk/pics2/somepossiblefutur
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Now that we've got everyone talking about battery life of the PSP - what about DRM? I threw my MiniDisc player in the garbage, after the headaches I had to endure with the software / copy protection.
I'm not trolling, one of the selling points of the PSP is the fact that you can load up all kinds of user created content on it.
I'd hate to purchase one just to find out that I have to do it Sony's way, or no way. I really don't want to make another one of those expensive mistakes.
Not laughing, actually. IGN isn't really high on my list of sites that I don't automatically assume are wrong. I've seen too many examples of them outright lying not to take this with a grain of salt. But it really has me wondering: Sony themselves were talking aobut FAR less battery life than IGN is reporting. That really sounds off. Sony is the last company to understate their products. If you could realistically expect 5 hours from the PSP, I would expect them to be talking about ten to fifteen hours, not two, one, and less like they have been. Anyway, I'm still waiting to hear about the moving parts issues. Battery life was the least of my worries. I feel very uncomfortable carrying something around in my pocket or bookbag that could be susceptible to shock damage, and I don't want to have to go and modify my laptop bag again to make a padded spot for one.
i got one in Shinjuku on launch day and played Ridge Racers for a solid 4 hours and some time just dinking around before the battery crapped out. i'm perfectly satisfied with that performance. i see a lot of PSP bashing from people that don't even have one. i think that once you have one in your hands, you'll whistle a different tune. i like the DS, but the PSP experience is light years ahead of the DS experience.
My GBA gets near 20 hours of battery life! I can basically take it on a vacation and not have to worry about bring along the recharging equipment.
I will tell you from personal experence that the battery life on the ds is more than 10 hours, I ran mine for 13 hours on a single charge. oh and to games not being 'adult' enought i point you here
Sony did similar things when they were releasing benchmarks of the Playstation 2 -- they turned off all lights in the room, and rendered a black triangle polygon in a black room. The numbers were amazing. But they weren't real at all.
So yeah. PSP Battery Life: 90 minutes. This drops further if you enable WIFI.
People will be buying this thing mainly to play those graphically intense games. Right? I mean that seems like the whole point of this things..
Things are only going to get worse. New games will probably have higher and higher load times with more and more graphics and the battery lifes going to get worse and worse.
By what the gamespot article said it sounds like 90 mins was still with the wi-fi turned off.. Hmm
5 hours of playing MP3's, though. If you look at the diary, a lot of their time appears to be related to playing MP3's.
On my TapWave, I can listen to MP3's for a long time without running down the battery, because playing a MP3 requires virtually no processor time. I would guess that if you played a lot of MP3's and played fewer games, you could stretch the batter life a lot.
If your code is acting bloated, and is running rather slow, it's likely and predicted that some loops you will unroll.
The PSP is overpowered as a game machine. Obviously Nintendo knows the magic formula for handheld games is to keep it simple, innovate with the control scheme, and keep your battery life up at the expense of nearly everything else. As a pure game machine, the NDS probably wins in the long run (literally).
However - and its a big however - the PSP is not just a game machine. Sony has made some gut-wrenching design decisions (for them, anyways) to keep this thing open to its users... and the result is actually aimed more at the nascent phone game market, the GameBoy market, the portable audio and video market, and the wireless connectivity market. Its trying to carve a new niche, and this is exactly what Sony is good at.
Witness: a plain USB port with full standards-compliant access to the memory card as a drive volume. Regular folders named with things like 'photos' and 'music'. The screen - which is much better than the DS - is something I could easily see as superior against an iPod Photo. WiFi - the verdict is still out on how this will expand - but its standard, and not some proprietary version. MP3 support, also a major shift from Sony's ATRAC3 (although I guess it will play that too).
And finally let us not ignore the fact that it ships with white headphones. This can mean only one thing: invasion.
As for battery life, it looks pretty good to me, as I rarely play my PS2 for more than 3 hours (ahem) at a time... but that is personally a subjective thing. I do think its still to early to measure realistically as it will likely go up as programmers learn the tricks necessary to optimize/minimize battery drain. (Of course it might go down again as they all try to compete with Metal Gear Acid).
And finally, if you can find a plug, the game equation vs. the DS is a no-brainer if you ask me (peanut gallery: no one did.). The PSP is more capable graphically and those optical cartridges will lay waste to the tiny memory storage of a DS cartridge. The impromptu WiFiLAN party will rock with one of these.
So for me - the DS is neat, I like it. But I've never bought a GameBoy or any other portable game system because I don't want to carry just one gadget for that specific purpose. If it keeps some music, my picures (in a nice display), plays movies and really cool games, and does even a little WiFi access.. hell yeah, I'll take one.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
None of those had the near complete mindshare in the TV console scene that Sony does now, though. Ask most any serious gamer, and if their primary system is not PS2, then they'll most likely at least own one, with the exception of people who own just an XBox and Halo (and of course Halo 2), who are unlikely to buy a handheld anyway. The best case was Sega, which was probably about even with Nintendo in the 16-bit console days. The Game Gear's battery-guzzling was not only the annoyance that the PSP might be, but also was expensive. 6 AA batteries is not a trivial expense for a few hours of play, and rechargeables at the time were slow to recharge and underpowered. Plus, Game Gear did not have Tetris, and was huge and heavy. This round, there's no killer app, and the PSP is about the same size as a closed DS, and considerably sleeker.
I agree, though, that Sony does have to put up a fight, but the situation is not nearly as grim as it was for most of the previous competitors.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri