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[u_neek]

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=56691

A report on the PSP in that magazine suggests that the handheld will be able to play games continuously for up to eight hours.

Music, on the other hand, will be able to run for around ten hours, while movies are apparently a lot more intensive and will only be able to last for two and a half hours

old?

 

[RevenantKioku]

Don't know about old.
Not surprising though.

 

[TekunoRobby]

First it's $300 then it isn't. First it plays for only 4 hours then it doesn't. SONY NEEDS TO GET THIER ACT TOGETHER AND DO SOME ADDRESSING BEFORE THE RUMORS DRIVE ME BATTY.

 

[belgurdo]

Now maybe people will stop crying about it and will question how long the DS runs for once

 

[teh_pwn]

What does up to mean? The system idle at a menu with audio off?

 

[Kiriku]

If true (true in the sense that it will be around 8 hours), that would definitely be enough for me.

 

[mrklaw]

surely bollocks.

How can music last only slightly longer than games, when games have the huge, backlit screen on (assuming music turns the screen off, otherwise they are twats anyway), Accesses the UMD quite often, AND plays music!?

I'll give them some extra juice to read off the memory stick, but that still doesn't add up.

It'd be cool if it did last 8 hours (but *up to* sounds suspiciously like 'if you are playing solitaire its 8 hours'), but then music should be like 15-20

And movies seems a bit odd. Sure you are streaming off UMD, but surely it can't suck power that badly? These are the guys that pretty much perfected MD battery life/disc based efficiency.

 

[u_neek]

Now the only problems are the price and the screen-that'll-get-scratched-when-you-look-at-it™

 

[cja]

Looks like Popular Science are just using Kaz's comments from E3.

 

[mr2mike]

8 hours for games is plenty enough (IMO), t's been years since I went through that long a gaming session.

but only 10 hours for music is pathetic, would one have to keep the screen on while it's tucked away in a pocket just playing music from a mem stick?

wtf?

Not that I dont have a 40-hour-playing minidisc to keep my ears busy. screw psp music

movies I dont care. not planning on using psp as a movie player, unless it has some kind of revolutionnary feature that places it above DVD in the home entertainment food chain...

 

[nubbe]

maybe it's 8 hours for Karaoke games

 

[NWO]

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=56691

A report on the PSP in that magazine suggests that the handheld will be able to play games continuously for up to eight hours.

Music, on the other hand, will be able to run for around ten hours

WTF?

That doesn't make any sense unless this 8 hours of gaming is without any sound. I don't see how music can last only 2 more hours than gaming can.

 

[Lazy8s]

The 'eight hours' figure is probably an approximation for the maximum battery life that would result from the simplest of games. The number goes down towards the other, lower figures mentioned before as game complexity with drive usage increases.

 

[RevenantKioku]

Now maybe people will stop crying about it and will question how long the DS runs for once

I thought we already got confirmation on that?

 

[Mooreberg]

If the disc is always being accessed for music, but portions of data are loaded into RAM for games, would that account for the small difference in battery drainage? Eight hours sounds good to me, I just want to know the North American MSRP. I'm hoping $249.99

 

[TekunoRobby]

If the disc is always being accessed for music, but portions of data are loaded into RAM for games, would that account for the small difference in battery drainage?

There is no valid explanation for the small difference between gameplay time and music time. Either that figure is completely false, the PSP really uses a lot of battery to play music, or that gameplay figure is taken from highly minimal use of the PSP's features. Using the GPU and CPU processing cycles takes up far more battery than a simple spinning disc.

 

[Catchpenny]

Sounds like the old estimate given by Kaz Hirai at E3. Ten hours for music, "up to" eight hours for games, two and a half hours for movies.

This may end up being correct, but it's likely based on old information, not anything new.

 

[TekunoRobby]

At this point in time since Sony is so damned stubborn with any concrete details, reading any information regarding the PSP from someone other than Sony should either be ignored or taken with a grain of sand. These rumors are already starting to get ridiculous.

 

[The Faceless Master]

Looks like Popular Science are just using Kaz's comments from E3.

IAWTP

 

[Insertia]

8 hours is good enough for me. ::thumbsup::
10 hours for music is even better. My Mp3 player burns through a AAA battery in half that time (although it's still up in the air if PSP will officialy support mp3).
Annouce a $200-$250 price and sit back and watch PSP carve a huge chunk out of Nintendo's market share.

 

[Drexon]

W0000h0hh0h00000! 8 hours!!! Sweet!!

And are you just taking that 10h statement from E3 and applying it now? That's retarded, as hell.

 

[Panajev2001a]

8 hours ? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


Nice laugh, thanks.

 

[puck1337]

8 hours of Pong, 6 hours of Frogger.

 

[Panajev2001a]

This place will go on fire in not many days... lol.

 

[Gattsu25]

Sounds like the old estimate given by Kaz Hirai at E3. Ten hours for music, "up to" eight hours for games, two and a half hours for movies.

This may end up being correct, but it's likely based on old information, not anything new.

old estimate from E3?

then why is it the only number i heard anyone talk about afterwards was 2 hours?

wait...i already know :\

 

[DSN2K]

I dont believe this news.

 

[sohka88]

This is definitely from E3. I say it will probably do 5-6 hours of game play.

 

[mrklaw]

hey pana, you clearly seem to think you have insider knowledge on this. Surely from your comments it can only go one of two ways:

1) Either its like 2 hours of gameplay, Sony were waiting to release such a bad piece of news - this place will erupt

Or

2) , its like 20 hours of gamplay, and Sony were waiting for Nintendo to move before amazing everyone - this place will erupt.


Which would you tend towards?

 

[sprsk]

old estimate from E3?

then why is it the only number i heard anyone talk about afterwards was 2 hours?

wait...i already know :\

because later on kaz hirai said games were about 3 hours.

 

[Panajev2001a]

hey pana, you clearly seem to think you have insider knowledge on this. Surely from your comments it can only go one of two ways:

1) Either its like 2 hours of gameplay, Sony were waiting to release such a bad piece of news - this place will erupt

Or

2) , its like 20 hours of gamplay, and Sony were waiting for Nintendo to move before amazing everyone - this place will erupt.


Which would you tend towards?

Not 20, but I do not know jack on this issue of course... .

 

[snapty00]

I'll believe it when I see it. Unless they stuck a battery in that thing that has about four times the battery life as the previous battery, then I don't see that as being possible.

 

[PS2 KID]

I'm expecting Sony to surprise us and have good battery life with the PSP. They've been on a roll lately with good battery times in the HD MP3 (yes they make one) and ATRAC players, their digital cameras and their latest clies (most recently the TH55 and soon to be released VZ90). I really do hope their electronics division has lent a hand to SCEI.

 

[Phoenix]

It all depends on the battery they put in it. Mp3 players that are HD based generally last 10-12 hours by caching stuff in memory and only spinning up the drive every so often. The PSP will not be able to exploit this and the drive will have to be spinning almost constantly along with giving juice to the screen.

When running Apple's Tiger I put it on my iPod and run the OS off that. While I don't expect the same usage/power pattern, the iPod was able to stay useful for a little over 3 hours under nearly constant access. Given the low power usage of the PSPs UMD reader and constant access to the screen I am going to bet on a realistic 3-4 hours max on most games since the PSP will have to spin the UMD a lot as it won't have a gig of memory to cache its games and textures in

 

[mrklaw]

The PSP will not be able to exploit this and the drive will have to be spinning almost constantly along with giving juice to the screen

Why?

Maybe Sony will issue guidelines as to best practice. Such as 'don't stream data from the UMD all the time'

Then you are back to your mp3 situation.

As mentioned above, Sony knows how to get good battery life out of mechanical things - look at the work they've done on MD.

Still, I have no idea on battery life - but I'm as curious as the next man.

Any idea when we'll know? Week after TGS?

 

[Deg]

battery life will be fine. Its hard to muck up. small components are also usualy more energy saving.

 

[Suikoguy]

8 hours is ok, actually great, with me,

I thought I heard about the DS being 7 to 10... about the same then.

 

[human5892]

Surely none of you are believing this report is based on new information...are you?

Come on. It's Popular Science. They're obviously just going off of the E3 battery life estimates.

 

[Kon Tiki]

What about games with Movies? Somone please think of the SquareSoft games!

 

[Chittagong]

With the power of the machine also comes another problem - the power. Admittedly, the PSP I played was - I was told by my guide - not a final version, but still the battery life was only estimated at two-hours, and for a machine supposed to be only two months from launch this isn't a good sign. I was however told that discussions regarding battery life were ongoing and that the final version of the hardware may benefit from longer playing time. Let's hope Sony can improve this, as two-hours seems rather short to us. Popular Science magazine this month counters this situation too, citing experts who suggest the PSP will last eight hours gaming, and ten playing music - which is far better than my demonstrator this afternoon implied!

http://ferrago.com/story/4470

 

[GDGF]

Yeah, that report is obviously basing it's info off of the strange battery life dance Sony higher ups were playing around E3 time. Lead times are getting better, but I dont think they learned anything new from the TGS showfloor and got it printed in the magazine this fast! :lol

 

[human5892]

With the power of the machine also comes another problem - the power. Admittedly, the PSP I played was - I was told by my guide - not a final version, but still the battery life was only estimated at two-hours, and for a machine supposed to be only two months from launch this isn't a good sign. I was however told that discussions regarding battery life were ongoing and that the final version of the hardware may benefit from longer playing time. Let's hope Sony can improve this, as two-hours seems rather short to us.

Pana's secret info?

 

[Dan]

A report on the PSP in that magazine suggests that the handheld will be able to play games continuously for up to eight hours.

Regardless of whether this is anything new or from E3, we still have no firm idea what the average battery life will be.

 

[rastex]

Moving mechanical parts takes significantly more power than simple electrical usage. It's just physics, disc weighs many many grams when a trillion electrons weigh nothing. So these relative figures make sense.

Movies - disc has to spin very quickly to access high data rate for video

Games - disc spins sporadically loading data into RAM

Music - disc spins, but much slower compared to movies since low data rate required.

So what this means for games is that those that are constantly accessing the disc will kill the battery pretty quickly, compared to games that can be loaded entirely into RAM that should last a damn long time. It's all dependent on how much the disc needs to be spun. Of course Sony also got their MD players to have absolutely ridiculous lifetimes (100+ hours on 1 battery) so maybe the screen plays a much bigger role than the disc even.

 

[AndreasNystrom]

guess you can turn off the screen for musicplaying = more batterytime.

while video without video is like eating pancake, without the cake.

 

[jarrod]

guess you can turn off the screen for musicplaying = more batterytime.

Hey, maybe they're using a Sound Novel for those game time numbers?

 

[Phoenix]

Why?

Maybe Sony will issue guidelines as to best practice. Such as 'don't stream data from the UMD all the time'

Then you are back to your mp3 situation.

As mentioned above, Sony knows how to get good battery life out of mechanical things - look at the work they've done on MD.

Still, I have no idea on battery life - but I'm as curious as the next man.

Any idea when we'll know? Week after TGS?

Because more than likely you don't have as much memory as the game is going to need, as such you will be fetching stuff from the UMD the same way you do with anything else. You more than likely aren't going to power down an optical drive and pause gameplay while waiting for it to spin up because that would be non-deterministic, Sony won't know when developers decide to fetch data from the UMD. The power usage profile for a game is going to be pretty close to that of watching a movie - the screen is going to be on all the time and the disk is going to be spinning almost continuously. The iPod, the MD, etc. are a different power profile. You can store a significant amount (if not all) of a song in memory at once. This allows you to turn the drive off for minutes at a time until its time to cache the next sone in memory.

 

[Bluemercury]

This place will go on fire in not many days... lol.

You're saying the PSP will handle more than 8 hours straight of playing time.?

 

[mrklaw]

Because more than likely you don't have as much memory as the game is going to need, as such you will be fetching stuff from the UMD the same way you do with anything else. You more than likely aren't going to power down an optical drive and pause gameplay while waiting for it to spin up because that would be non-deterministic, Sony won't know when developers decide to fetch data from the UMD.

Sure, if thats how you write your games. But if that results in getting 1.5 hours, and writing games that load the whole level into memory and only spin up to load the next level - then you get 5 hours, I know what I'd recommend if I were Sony.

 

[Panajev2001a]

You're saying the PSP will handle more than 8 hours straight of playing time.?

I do not think it will last 8 hours playing good looking games, but then again I do not know jack .

 

[puck1337]

Moving mechanical parts takes significantly more power than simple electrical usage. It's just physics, disc weighs many many grams when a trillion electrons weigh nothing. So these relative figures make sense.

Movies - disc has to spin very quickly to access high data rate for video

Games - disc spins sporadically loading data into RAM

Music - disc spins, but much slower compared to movies since low data rate required.

So what this means for games is that those that are constantly accessing the disc will kill the battery pretty quickly, compared to games that can be loaded entirely into RAM that should last a damn long time. It's all dependent on how much the disc needs to be spun. Of course Sony also got their MD players to have absolutely ridiculous lifetimes (100+ hours on 1 battery) so maybe the screen plays a much bigger role than the disc even.

High quality 3D graphics are not exactly cheap when it comes to energy consumption. And the better and more diverse the graphics, the more loading from disc. Expect the best looking games on this thing to kill the battery in short order. Maybe not as quickly as a movie, but close.