Gameboy? Nah Sony PSP Please!!!

[Guest ClintEastman]

The electronics giant, whose PlayStation 2 games console has outsold rivals from Microsoft and Nintendo 3-to-1, announced plans Tuesday for a handheld game player.

The PSP, introduced during a press conference in advance of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show here, would compete to some extent with Nintendo's Game Boy, which has all but owned the portable game market for more than a decade.

But Sony apparently has grander plans than a nice game of Tetris. The PSP will have a screen capable of showing 3D images, stereo sound, USB 2.0 connectivity and a custom processor built on cutting-edge 90-nanometer chipmaking technology. 

The device will also use a new media format. The UMD disc is an optical disc about half the size of a DVD or CD and capable of holding 1.8GB of data.

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[Guest adam]

Swish!!

[Guest adam]

plans to release the device late next year

Sadly we have 18 months to wait, and that could just be for the Japanese version! :)

[Guest superkingdave]

mmm... nice :)

[Guest ClintEastman]

The world's favourite computer entertainment system prepares to bust out of the living room and take on the wider world, as SCEI announces an entirely new platform. Say hello to PSP.  

 

This is absolutely huge. I mean, gargantuan. You might want to sit down and take a few deep breaths before reading on. At the annual SCEA press conference (held today ahead of E3), Ken Kutaragi, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, unveiled PSP, a brand new handheld entertainment platform. Pencilled in for release as early as late 2004, PSP (PlayStation Portable) is based around the Universal Media Disc (UMD), an entirely new 60mm optical disc housed in a cartridge similar to that of a Mini-Disc. The UMD has been developed by the Sony Group using its latest disc technologies, and will be used across a range of Sony products besides PSP.

While SCE has long been rumoured to be considering entering the handheld market (you may remember speculation about 'PocketStation' a few years back), this is the real deal. A new licence scheme that will allow third party publishers to develop for the platform will be announced as early as this summer, with the first PC-based development tools rolling out in autumn. Several of the major Japanese players are already said to be on board as partners in the project. As a portable device (i.e. not reliant on a TV), the PSP will also be free from region coding, meaning that PSP games from Japan and the US will work out of the box - good news for import fans.

Besides the aforementioned Universal Media Disc (which houses a whopping 1.8GB - around three times as much data as a PS one disc), PSP is powered by super chipsets that take advantage of the latest 90nm semiconductor technology. Alongside traditional polygons, PSP also utilises NURBS (that's Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline for the technologically minded among you) for graphical quality that far surpasses that of PlayStation. The PSP's 4.5" screen is a 480 x 272 pixel TFT LCD monitor that uses the widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9. The video CODEC is MPEG4, and it's estimated that the PSP will be capable of around two hours of high resolution full motion video playback at DVD quality.  

But that's not all; PSP will include a USB 2.0 port for connectivity with other devices, such as PS2s or other PSPs, and a Memory Stick slot in place of a PS one or PS2 style Memory Card slot. As well as obvious functions such as saving game data, the Memory Stick can also be used for 'networking applications and data transportability in a wireless environment'. Now this sounds deliberately vague to us at the moment, but one thing is clear; the PSP's potential applications extend far beyond conventional handheld gaming. It's a brand new system, entirely separate from PS one or PS2, that is an entertainment device in the broadest imaginable sense of the term. Think games, think music, think video. Longer term, the potential uses are fairly mind boggling; radio, wireless communicator, digital camera, Global Positioning system...  

Mind-blowingly exciting as this all is, we currently have no idea what the PSP will look like - it could be up to a year before the public unveiling of the first prototype - but SCE has confirmed that it will feature a similar button layout to the DualShock, albeit modified for the smaller, portable platform. Specifics on pricing are to be confirmed, but SCE is aiming to make the PSP a mass-market device, which suggests that affordability, both for the hardware and software, is likely to be a priority. If you're in any doubt as to just how huge an impact PSP will have, not just on gaming but on portable entertainment in general, we'll leave you with a quote from Kutaragi-san himself: "This is THE 'Walkman' of the 21st century". Enough said.

Looks like this is gona be a biggie!!

Oh, and the same unit worldwide?

[Guest Mr_Protozoa]

Ah fook that!

The SPV can already do half that stuff.

And the smartphones released by then will probally outclass it anyway!

[Guest ClintEastman]

Somehow I doubt that by 2004 (or 2006 to be fair) that we are going to have phones with hardware NURBS rendering! :)

[Guest Mr_Protozoa]

Well yeh, but....

Who would have thought 2 years ago that we could watch films and play DooM on our phones?

Who knows what the furure will bring?

[Guest ClintEastman]

Personally I think if it wasn’t for the “throw away” Nokia’s we would have had it sooner! :)

Customers accept that a game on a mobile will look like snake or (at best) pacman.

What we need is micro GPU’s!! :(

[Guest pisquee]

"The device will also use a new media format. The UMD disc is an optical disc about half the size of a DVD or CD and capable of holding 1.8GB of data."

sounds like some kind of data mini disc - UMD? hmmm .... Ultra Mini Disc?

[Guest ClintEastman]

Universal Media Disc (UMD) for use in future sony products. (not the PS3 though, should imagine that will be some sort of blue ray setup).

[Guest adam]

Your move Gates!

[Guest Vector]

i heard some time ago that there was a handheld xbox coming out, but i've heard nothing since then :roll:

[Guest adam]

Well it was Sony banging on about how great the ps2 was gonna be which spawned the Xbox.

[Guest zainkhan2050]

Guys this thing (sony psp) can play games that in some departments are better loonking than PS2! :shock:

You just cant beat that on a handheld. :shock:

Im a big fan of the device. :D

psp.jpg

[Guest Vector]

yep, can't wait for this, playing Gran Turismo 4 on the move :D

[Guest [flicker]]

There's no doubt that the PSP will do well, but at the end of the day many of the titles that are going to be available have been confirmed to be PS2 ports....so to be fair, until some original games start to appear you're going to have to shell out for games you more than likely already own again just on a new media type. As for the film play back...again, why would you want to have to pay again for films you already own on DVD. That's the problem with a new media type in this sort of context. So yeah, as someone who works in the industry, i think the PSP will do well but at the market it's aimed at and the same for the Nintendo DS. Sony and Nintendo have both agreed that they're aiming for two seperate markets so it's nice to see that they both acknowledge each other's different audiences. (Still want a PSP and a DS though!)

[Guest mike-oh]

Presumably if it has USB2.0 compatibilty you'll be able to transfer DVDs across?

And on a similar topic, i heard rumours that the PS3 will be running in the teraflops region!!!! a "super computer on a chip". Anyone else heard this?