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."

Comments

But how many...

[GoldRanger]

...McGriddles did they consume in that same time span?

Whine, Whine, Whine

[Voltage Spike]

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.

Re:Whine, Whine, Whine

[Jorkapp]

We'll find out in 6 months.

Re:Whine, Whine, Whine

[chaboud]

You mean, the way that Sony did? cough

I can't think of a swap being much more easy than that.

Re:Whine, Whine, Whine

[Aero Leviathan]

Yes. I believe an RTFA is in order.

7:45PM: Battery died
And I was right in the middle of a huge score in the Industrial skin on Lumines! It's okay, though, because the PSP goes into sleep mode when the battery dies, allowing you to continue play exactly where you left off, once you've gotten more power to your system.

Re:Whine, Whine, Whine

[cortana]

I'm confident that Sony, the same company that gave us consoles whose optical drives break after 13 months use, would not make such a stupid mistake.

Betteries for PSP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what version of Paint Shop Pro you guys use, but mine does not need batteries. :)

Not too shabby?

[theREALMcCoy]

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.

Re:Not too shabby?

[Lumpy]

which brings me back to my idea from 10 years ago..

the charging mat/table. a simple coil in a mat or under the table and then secondary coils built in the electronics.

set the device on the table/mat and it starts charging. people would eat it up, although cellphone companies would lose money as their entire profit model is on selling new chargers, that is why they change the charger plug every 30 minutes in a production run of a phone to ensure that you have to buy all new chargers every time.

imagine if your phone, pda, and game as well as other devices that use batteries would subscribe to the charging mat/table design... throw all the items on the table and they charge.

it's technology from over 20 years ago, I wrote a paper about it for Electronics Engineering in 1991 and here we are in the 21'st century and we have more chargers than we have gadgest because manufacturers refuse to standardize.

disgusting isn't it?

You know, you could have linked without the ad

[Anonymous Crowhead]

link

Dear Journal

[Locdonan]

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.

Re:Yeah but...

[eln]

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.

Re:peh

[UWC]

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.

DS does 10

[kuwan]

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.

--
Free Nintendo DS

Re:DS does 10

[FuzzzyLogik]

Ok I'll bite. I own a GBA SP that they claim lasts 10 hours with frontlighting on and 16 with it off. My experience has been about 12-13 hours with the frontlight on and I can't comment on the frontlight off because I never turn it off. Nintendo typically gives correct numbers for batterly life, as you can see my battery life is actually HIGHER than they stated. So how's that for ya? I would trust nintendo, where I do not trust Sony.

Re:DS does 10

[SetupWeasel]

I own a DS. I seem to get 8-10 hours from Super Mario 64 DS. I have heard as much as 12 hours, but I suspect that may be from someone using mainly GBA carts. I have also heard as little as 6-7 hours, and that would include some wireless play.

Here is an AP review

A quote:
"I managed 7-1/2 hours of battery life on a single charge, playing graphics-intensive games, blasting the music through the stereo speakers and connecting online with another DS."

Though it does not say if the wireless was used the entire time.

interesting criteria

[fireduck]

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.

Battery University

[The I Shing]

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.

GameSpot reports otherwise...

[unclethursday]

GameSpot reports on battery life.

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]

Re:GameSpot reports otherwise...

[SetupWeasel]

Considering that Gamespot used the most graphically intensive release game and IGN didn't, I'm more inclined to trust Gamespot's numbers. Gamespot said it depended what you were doing, so they used a graphically intensive game to get the low end.

IGN played freaking music files for one hour and played a puzzle game for one hour and forty-five minutes.

Going by what IGN said, they spent 2 hours playing games likely to drain the battery quickly and spent 2:45 doing things that aren't likely to drain the battery quickly.

I imagine that if you stick to the rigorous itenerary IGN gave precisely, you will get 4.5 hours. But if you want to play Ridge Racers single-player, you will get 1.5 - 3 hours.

Either way, it is a far cry from the 10 hours Sony promised us at E3.

And you trust... IGN?

[juuri]

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.

Re:Yeah but...

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:Less then 5 hours is "not too shabby"?

[k_187]

Nope, wrong. The PSP Battery is replaceable, new ones are just 45 bucks a pop. I do believe that the only way to charge them is plugged into the PSP though, so most of your point still stands, but you can charge them up and have standbys waiting.

ukresist has some funny images about the PSP

[joeldg]

http://ukresistance.co.uk/
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/somepossiblefuture .jpg

Re:Bias

[Ayaress]

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.

5 hours at best? I will stick with my GBA then.

[Jagasian]

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.

Gamespot says 90 minutes in real life tests

[_KiTA_]

Accordig to reports from Gamespot, the battery lasts approximately an hour and a half to 3 hours playing a complex 3d game like Ridge Racer. The benchmarks from Sony apparently come from using non-graphically intense, small games that don't require much CPU, VPU, or disc read time.

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.

Q: How long does the PSP's battery last?

A: The short answer is that it depends on what you're doing. The longer answer is that Sony has stated that the battery should last around six hours. With simpler-looking games, like Lumines or Mahjong Fight Club, that definitely seems to be the case. But with more graphically intensive games, like Ridge Racers, the battery doesn't last quite as long. Based on our estimates and a few battery-draining tests, Ridge Racers seems to last somewhere between 90 minutes and three hours. Playing with the wireless networking switch flipped on will also further reduce your battery life. The system has an auto-sleep function that stops the wireless drain, but that switch is there for a reason. Turn it off when you're not using it.

Interesting PSP observations

[thatguywhoiam]

I too have been looking around at the various 'reviews' popping up online. The PSP looks pretty nice, but everyone should keep in mind that they are not really aimed at the same audience.

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.