Rob6021 said:
$400-$500?? who are you kidding? The price will be somewhere between $100 and $200. You seriously think they could sell units at that price?
The CEO of Atari, who are aiming to produce games for the system, put an unofficial estimate price at $500. I've heard other names (someone from EA amongst them) place it at $300 and above, but nobody respectable has claimed anything lower. Given that over here in the UK the exchange rate on tech seems to be 1:1 for $:ÂŁ, that's me looking at ÂŁ300 for the PSP. Which is a bit feckin steep.
Sony
have made a statement on battery life: 2 hours for movies (when the drive mechanism is constantly in use), 8 for games, and 10 for MP3 (which would transfer whatever file is being played to memory using pretty much no moving parts at all, also using minimal amounts of system resources during playback). Games generally do need to stream data as long as you're doing something (which tends to be the majority of the time), and certainly use system resources, so 8 hours has got to be massively conservative; this has been asserted by large numbers of people who are actually going to have something to do with the device. As for the battery pack to resolve short battery life problems... why should I have to spend additional money and carry around something to solve a problem that should have been thought about properly in the first place? Why should the customer have to deal with Sony's power consumption issues?
Either way, if the PSP or the DS comes out with less than 4 hours battery life per charge, it's an insult. Everyone right now is saying, "well, for PS2 level graphics I don't care about the battery length"... that's pretty much what your older brothers/sisters said about the Game Gear, until they actually got one. If a handheld doesn't have a good battery life then it doesn't get used as much. If it doesn't get used as much it won't get many games sold, as it'll spend all its time in the closet. The older people here know this because
exactly the same thing happened 12 years ago, with Game Gear vs Gameboy - I knew a bunch of people with Game Gears, who never used them because the batteries died in 2 hours. I remember the graphics on the Game Gear were unthinkable for a handheld back then. I also knew a bunch of people with Gameboys who took them everywhere with them, because they always worked. The graphics were a decade behind the Game Gear, but it didn't matter because the system was convenient. Low battery life = dead system. High price = dead system. Both together just feels instinctively like failure to me. Sony need to sort this out before release.
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