Massive PSP battery life breakdown at IGN
- Thread starter ManaByte
- Start date
Vark said:
A lot of your stuff is valid, but if you have particular habits, lots can be gotten around.
Travel between work and home and play in both locations? Buy another AC adapter.
Travel a lot on long haul? Buy a couple extra batteries. (or fly alitalia)
Simply being able to play movies for 5 hours is pretty impressive. Dedicated portable DVD players and many laptops cannot play for longer than 2 hours (I still don't understand the point of those...)
I disagree that if you have to buy anything extra its 'bullshit'. You don't *have* to buy anything, but you may want to if you have particular needs. There isn't any law that says a portable device must last from home-home with no charging between. And there isn't any law that makes the GBA immune from running out of charge away from home either
And its a hell of a lot more convenient than lugging a home console around and finding a display to hook it up to. That 4-6 hr battery life is still 4-6 hrs of gaming I wouldn't normally have had away from home.Vark said:
You shouldn't even need a single battery!!! It should draw power from the ETHER!!! WHY ARE YOU SETTLING?!?xsarien said:
why is two AC adapters a bit much? I have a USB charger for my GBA at work, just in case I get the dreaded red light. Because the battery lasts so long, the GBA gets the least of my attention, and therefore doesn't get regularly charged. Kind of backwards, but thats what happens.
These are torture tests. That RR came within 30min of the official Sony number of 4-6hrs is good, given the first test setup. I would guess based on Namco's past launch work that RR might be a great benchmark for the first year of the system's life. When games get more advanced, the battery size will have to increase IMO, but we'll see. Wifi play OTOH is pretty weak, but that's fine I guess. You'll just need to find something else to do beyond 3 hours with your friends. Car chargers would be a good idea for road trips I guess. :? Anyway, seems fine to me. Sleep mode will end up being the way to go to minimize load times. That way you only have to worry about the initial boot when switching games. The MP3 time is also good, so I guess once the memory stick rapage ends, it will make a good MP3 player. PEACE.
EDIT: Oh yeah, Sony's official numbers are for the medium brightness setting, which is still very bright apparently.
EDIT: Oh yeah, Sony's official numbers are for the medium brightness setting, which is still very bright apparently.
open_mouth_
insert_foot_
I think the thing that scares some people about battery life is that it's not very long to begin with and that future games may take up even more juice, and thus, result in less play time between charges. Another fear is that Sony will release more powerful batter packs seperately for early adopters to purchase, but then proceed to use this newer packs in retail units instead of the old packs.
People don't like feeling jipped. As for me, I don't care.
People don't like feeling jipped. As for me, I don't care.
open_mouth_ said:
The real battery issues here are:
(1) This essentially kills the PSP as a viable multi-player gaming unit.
(2) What if you don't get the best battery from Sony in your unit like the guys at GameSpot. You are then stuck with a battery that only gives you 90 minutes of Ridge Racer?
(3) What the FUCK do you do in 12 months when that battery has been re-charged 100 times and it no longer holds a charge as well? You are reduced to 2 hours single player and 1 hour multi-player per charge. Your yearly maintenance fee for you PSP then becomes 45 dollars.
open_mouth_ said:
Its likely that future games will use *less* juice. RR is quite a technical showcase as is, and it had the UMD spinning all the time playing the music. Later on, as developers get used to the workings, I'm sure there will be longer playing times.
We play mashed in the office at lunchtimes for 30 minutes. This is perfect for that. It kills the PSP for long multiplayer sessions, but then you'd likely be at someones house so either play on a console, or take your AC adapter. Not perfect, but smaller than a TV.
First, its more likely 500 charges. Second, you post the same question on an ipod forum and go buy another battery.
mrklaw said:
No you will see significant battery loss on that PSP unit way before 500 charges. 500 charges might be its total lifetime before utter failure. Its really a function of how many amps it pulls.
Except that with an ipod battery if you cut the useage time in half the unit is still useable. With a PSP if you cut the useage time in half re-charging every 1.5 hours then becomes royal pain in the ass.
And for the pre-teen and teen market, the added cost of buying a new battery every year just further puts this device out of its financial reach.
Kung Fu Jedi
Member
I guess I don't get it. If you don't like the battery life of the PSP, then continue playing with the GBA or the NDS. They both have much longer battery lives. Now, by sacrificing battery life, you get a much better screen and more powerful hardware. If you're a graphics whore (*ahem) then the PSP will be worth it. There simply isn't a more powerful handheld gaming system to be had right now.
I want the PSP (have one pre-ordered for US Launch) and I'm willing to give up some battery life for improved graphics and a much nicer screen. Not everyone will agree, but for me, it's a fair trade off, and when I need longer battery life, for a long flight, etc., I'll pick up a spare battery.
KFJ
I want the PSP (have one pre-ordered for US Launch) and I'm willing to give up some battery life for improved graphics and a much nicer screen. Not everyone will agree, but for me, it's a fair trade off, and when I need longer battery life, for a long flight, etc., I'll pick up a spare battery.
KFJ
soundwave05
Member
I don't think its unreasonable to buy a second battery for an extra $40. Now you're in the 7+ hours range even for games like Ridge Racers at full scree brightness and full speaker volume.
If you're on the road for an extended period (like say a car trip), I don't think you *need* to have the PSP at full friggin' brightness the whole time either. Turn the brightness down and you save a lot of power (even on the lowest setting, its still brighter than the DS).
Other than that, eventually Sony and third parties will release higher capacity batteries in 2005, if its that much of an issue for you, simply wait a little while.
If you're on the road for an extended period (like say a car trip), I don't think you *need* to have the PSP at full friggin' brightness the whole time either. Turn the brightness down and you save a lot of power (even on the lowest setting, its still brighter than the DS).
Other than that, eventually Sony and third parties will release higher capacity batteries in 2005, if its that much of an issue for you, simply wait a little while.
bryanbr said:
I'm sorry, you have to quote a source on this.
bryanbr said:
Technically speaking the PSP is 10 hours+ for music playing. So if you wanted to compare this directly to iPOD it still holds up favourably. And of course unlike iPOD you can buy a replacement battery.
bryanbr said:
We'll see! It will be fun but I predict you will be eating so much crow that you're going to have to buy a new waredrobe.
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
That is very, VERY false. I have been using my Pocket PCs for years now, charging them every day, and even the oldest one, that is four years old, still has simillar battery life it had the day I bought it - and yes, they all use simillar type of battery as PSP (Lithium Ion)
CamHostage
Member
True. The system's been out for, what, 200hours since last Sunday? Maybe there will be some updates.
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guess I don't get it. If you don't like the battery life of the PSP, then continue playing with the GBA or the NDS. They both have much longer battery lives. Now, by sacrificing battery life, you get a much better screen and more powerful hardware
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Period.
That's the great thing about Sony's PSP design. It is powerful and sexy enough for people to go through the extra trouble to make up for minor shortcomings like carrying extra batteries and what not. Just like how people accept the piss poor 2-5 hour batteries in laptops and the ipod's hard to replace batteries (when first released). And the PSP will be even more affordable than these products.
If you want something with more battery life, then there are other options. If you want the PSP features and visuals, there is no other option
guess I don't get it. If you don't like the battery life of the PSP, then continue playing with the GBA or the NDS. They both have much longer battery lives. Now, by sacrificing battery life, you get a much better screen and more powerful hardware
--------------
Period.
That's the great thing about Sony's PSP design. It is powerful and sexy enough for people to go through the extra trouble to make up for minor shortcomings like carrying extra batteries and what not. Just like how people accept the piss poor 2-5 hour batteries in laptops and the ipod's hard to replace batteries (when first released). And the PSP will be even more affordable than these products.
If you want something with more battery life, then there are other options. If you want the PSP features and visuals, there is no other option
Future said:
The Game Gear, Nomad and a long list of other more powerful systems have had similiar selling points against the Nintendo Handheld Kingdom. However all system thus far, PSP included, have suffered one thing; Battery Life. The PSP will be a success no doubt, but they are automatically limiting themselves with the battery life. Oh I could go buy another battery, another charger, and why the hell not another PSP, but what is the point of prtable gaming? That's right portability, not carrying around extra batteries, chargers and so on. DS and much more so the SP have this. Battery life will not be the determining factor, but who knows maybe in the end the big screen and graphics will win everybody over, but it hasn't in the past. This fight isn't speckled with Nintendo's problems with the 64, if anything the PSP is coming in plagued with problems. I personally think in the end it will come down to brand name, and as much as I love Nintendo products and games people buy Sony just for the sake of buying Sony.
Kung Fu Jedi
Member
iyox said:
To be fair, the Game Gear and Nomad, both of which I owned at one point, required you to buy new batteries when they went dead. The recharagable battery of the PSP does help to overcome this. I also think the gaming market has grown A LOT since the GG and Nomad, and become more sophisticated. Dare I say it, perhaps the market can support two portables now!!??!!
evil solrac v3.0
Member
you people are batshit insane sometimes. it's a handheld. you play it in spurts when you're on the go. do you really need 50 hours to finish one little handlheld game!?!??
Yeah, because fives whole pages is necessary. It reminds me of the 18 part "Superior" and "Exclusive" feature Kiziko, formerly GAYmerweb, did on the ShenMue DEMO!! As for slinging poo at Gamespot, well, you guys aren't one to talk. You've got some dumbasses on your site too, IMO.ManaByte said:
evil solrac v3.0 said:
Believe a lot of little gaming sessions add up quickly throughout a day. I've killed my SP in a day before waiting around for classes( i think i forgot to charge it the night before). The point is you are going to start that thing up a binch of different times play a game for a little bit rinse and repeat. Which leads to another wonderful addition, load times. Honestly the PSP looks sexy as hell but I am not sold on it. The DS graphics after hearing what people were saying on here had me worried, but after demo'ing metroid I am excited for what i saw.
i remember on roadtrips i'd bust out the gamegear only for the batteries to die after 3 games of baseball.
and :lol :lol @ cybamerc being owned. i really cannot stand that guy. he's one of those behind the shadows type trolls -- you know, the type that don't think they're actually trolling.
and :lol :lol @ cybamerc being owned. i really cannot stand that guy. he's one of those behind the shadows type trolls -- you know, the type that don't think they're actually trolling.
Synbios459
Banned
The way I see it Sony is just trying to do way to much with the PSP then is really practicle. While having all the extra features are nice in the end the PSP is a handheld with the main purpose to play games. While the PSP may have more features and IMO look better, the DS is simply far more practicle.
Geezus, for you people going on long flights, even on a plane I'm sure you'd get bored of playing a game for more than a couple hours. Besides, they should have other ways to entertain you on flights like that. Go get a magazine, a book, take a nap, or something else. If you're ONLY playing videogames for a 5-10+ hour flight, I'd personally find that excessive.
Catchpenny
Member
Amir0x said:
Or, here's a crazy idea, maybe they could include more words and less filler per page! This would require IGN to stop shoving new ads in my face every thirty seconds, but I believe this magical dream can come true!
Catchpenny
Member
Amir0x said:
You referred to page length, and I didn't read his comments carefully. My bad. However, those set number of words are horribly inflated by this sort of thing:
IGN said:
as opposed to:
Bizarro IGN said:
Good editing and better writing could reduce the average IGN article's word count by half. Between the bloated writing and the push to divide articles into as many pages as possible for advertising purposes, reading IGN is tedious. I can understand the groans of some over reading a five (six, actually) page IGN article on battery life.
CamHostage
Member
It's a filler-type article. There are only five-six tests published here (so far, I guess - an extra is over on the IGN Board for 4 hours playing UMD Movies.) Most of the article doesn't need to be read that much since, like reviews, people just skip to the numbers, but if people want to know what's behind the numbers, it's there, with some fluff for some reason or other ... for the kiddies.
Little handheld games are now big handheld games with these two systems, but agreed, even on long flights, I've never played a Game Boy game straight through until the battery died - I've logged enough hours in between, but never fresh to dead play like that. I played a GBC game on an international flight and thought I had played it for most of the duration, but between food and sleeping, I was only about five or six levels in and probably only spent an hour on each (MG:GB was the game.)
goomba said:
Not sure. GBA dies on you. DS has a sleep mode, but don't know if its automatic
Wow, now I'm confused.
So PSP is shit because its battery life is too short. OK, with you so far.
So +1 DS. Check
Your GBA battery ran out? But DS has less battery life than GBA...
So all handhelds are crap?
But honestly this emphsizes the biggest flaw in the whole article, IGN's PSP push. The site is blatantly biased. Why include a line like that other than to voice your opinion about how great the PSP is? It has no relevance to the topic of the article. The same goes for DS articles. Barely a DS article is written without some pot-shot at the DS and how wonderful the PSP is. With the numbers stacking so oddly against the numbers from other sources like Gamespot. IGN's as a source of unbiased game related journalism has alwasy been questionable but now it is thrown in the trash.
But the owners can just carry around spare battery. Voila, double the dvd movie time. They can just charge it when they're not using it, and really who watches two movies in a row anyway? And most movies are shorter than 2 hours.
Your opinion on the inadaquacies of portable dvd players is about how i feel about the PSP for gaming sessions.
CamHostage
Member
Maybe. But there's no game that works with everything on, so you can't really do that. There's no game that uses the UMD for constant heavy use (no GTA-style constant streaming, for example). UMD Movies or game intros don't use the processor much. No game uses the Memory Stick for anything other than a save once in a great while, or puts heavy use on USB ins or outs. The volume, the screen, the UMD, the Memory Stick access, the WiFi, the processor and the VMU sub-processor are all the things that need testing, but you can't get a perfect combination of all of those things running full on all at once in terms of raw tests (you could just play the games, but that's in and out of menus, loads, etc.)
WiFi wasn't on for most of those tests, but the reason for there being a WiFi switch is unknown for now - every game that uses WiFi has to go into a special WiFi mode (that European FOOTBALL game will be the first to have XBL-style WiFi anytime play), so it probably isn't draining if it's just flipped on. The LED isn't even on unless it's sending or receiving.
CamHostage
Member
Quit being an ass. That has nothing to do with DS. RIDGE RACERS simply is a graphic showcase -- it has console-quality effects, and lots of them, all refreshing at 60hz. MGA and HOT SHOTS are pretty, but when you examine them, they are not as power-hungry. Maybe ARMORED CORE would be a comparable test, but who wants to play that? If you're going to put the PSP through its paces, this is the game to do it, and that little description explains why.
Marty Chinn
Member
Vark said:
Huh? And you can't do that with the PSP?
Specular mapping and framerate have nothing to do with what they were testing, they have everything to do with throwing out pretty sounding buzz-words to push forth a blatant "PSP is teh savi0ur of handheld gaming". There are other ways of pushing a system to its limits certainly graphicly intensive games are one way. Wait... OMG could they just have said, "Ridge Racer is the most graphically intense game of the current PSP lineup, firmly stressing the PSP hardware"? Sorry to have to reiterate the point made by the other poster but IGN's sentence is not in anyway needed, and really let's not get tied up in semantics here. My point was that IGN has a certain bias towards the PSP, and their positive coverage of it. That's something I would think everyone can agree on. I mean obviously they are quite enamored with the device, but at least provide fair coverage in every respect for competing systems. Going to the DS site is like setting foot in terminally ill patient's room at hospice.
Catchpenny
Member
iapetus said:
Headphones are "real-world" usage? I'll bet the percentage of PSP owners that use headphones on anything resembling a regular basis is in the single digits. Most people will probably leave brightness up, too.
They should've tested it with those settings anyway, of course, since obviously some people will use the PSP that way. I just take umbrage with saying those are real-world settings. Plus I'm being an asshole today, so whatever.
CamHostage
Member
Those kinds of tests are all over the place -- check the 40+ GA sticky for some RR playthroughs (there's also that battery journal). These are more stress tests. It would make sense to have some more standard use and low-setting tests as well in the results.
Bull. If RIDGE RACERS didn't have those kinds of effects and wasn't running at 60, it wouldn't be eating up the battery as fast. Look at tests that people have done of LUMINES or HOT SHOTS, the battery lasts longer. Why? Because the games aren't as complicated. And that's the f'ing point of doing a hard performance test, isn't it -- to test the machine in the hardest performance levels.
Specular map and particularly environment mapping matter a big ass deal (framerate should be pretty obvious, right?), because that's something that is calculated per surface at a given angle. As you move through the course, the angle shifts and the map (such as when you go into a tunnel or through a grove of trees) will swap. If the game were doing real reflection mapping, that'd be even more power. Same thing for textures and geometry - it has to be computed at different distances at different angles. The more stuff you have in a game, the more it takes to process that stuff, and the more battery life the processor will eat doing that. And that's the test.
Did you somehow miss that the entire Test 2 - Heavy UMD Use - was done on that game that way because the designers there either screwed up or have hardware here that couldn't handle loads better on a simple 2D fighting game like DARKSTALKERS? Or is your Bias Radar only tuned into one frequency?
Way to miss completely what I was saying. It's fairly easy to produce counter-arguments when you completely avoid what the person was saying in the first place. Honestly I don't give a shit about the bump-mapping, the framerate or any other superfluous terms to describe clock consuming endeavors. The fact that they went out of their way to describe in a pretty lengthy and unneeded way the industry buzz-words of why Ridge Racer is such a strain on the PSP is my argument. It augments IGN's position that PSP is the better system. Whether or not you feel the same as they do is immaterial, because as soon as you come to this realization the article is immediately biased. It's not any sort of distorted logic that leads me to this conclusion. IGN has stated they prefer the PSP and it shows in every facet of their dubious jorunalism.