SONY PLAYSTATION PORTABLE

The Unofficial place to find out all about the Sony Playstation Portable games console.

Sony's new handheld system, the PSP (PlayStation Portable) will be powered by a rechargeable battery, but Sony hasn’t announced exactly how many hours the battery will last before it will need to be charged though is expected to be around the 5-6 hour mark. This will be dependant on 2 things, what the PSP is being used for and what settings you have the PSP on.

So what else is powering this new handheld Playstation system? The PSP will use what are called Universal Media Discs (UMD), which is a 60mm optical disc (1.8 GB) in a cartridge. This kind of cartridge will allow for larger data capacity, lower media costs, and shorter manufacturing times. The cartridges will also have the latest copy protection technology implemented, so making copies of games will be harder.

The PSP will also have a wide screen 480x272 pixel (16:9) TFT LCD monitor, and it will have a backlight which can be altered to your tastes. The screen will also be powered by some of the newest and most powerful super chipsets (90 nm superconductor technology).

So the screen is good, but what will the graphics be like?

The graphics will be 3D, and this 3D rendering will be enhanced by the employment of curved surfaces (known as NURBS), and will also still have conventional polygons. Video wise (for cut-scenes etc.), video quality will be enhanced with MPEG4, which is like a DVD format, only at a lower data rate.

Another interesting feature of the PSP is that it will have a USB 2.0 port. This will allow possible connectivity to other PSP’s, PlayStation 2’s, the up and coming Playstation 3’s (which will also be able to connect via wireless technology) and possibly other systems as well (such as PC and X-box360).

The other slot the PSP will have is the memory stick slot for the Memory Stick Duo, which can be bought in various sizes from 32mb which comes with the PSP, to 2gb which are in production by Sony and other leading manufacturers of memory. This can then be used to store anything from photos to game saves to music to films.

So now you know most of the heavy details about the PSP, but you’re probably still wondering about the sound quality. Well, the PSP will have PCM (which are built-in stereo speakers, with a stereo headphone output).