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PSP battery life official (R.I.P) kidding

N

neptunes

Member
June 06, 2004 - GameInformer posted up an interview with SCEA President/CEO Kaz Hirai on the subject of Sony's latest baby, the PSP. Storage, pricepoint, and battery life all get touched on, with the answer to the battery question likely to cause some nerd rioting:

Game Informer: One thing I was a little confused about in the presentation was the battery life. At first you said ten hours and then you seemed to say it could be as short as two and I just wanted to clarify...

Kaz: Battery life is one of these things where if you state a number then everybody's satisfied. The only problem, of course, is it never matches what you state. But if you don't state a number then it's like, "What's the battery life?" So it's a continuous Catch-22. And that's especially prevalent with the PlayStation Portable because it plays various entertainment content. Again, if you're just listening to music with no visuals at all then it should last, as I said yesterday, about eight to ten hours just like an iPod would. If you are playing a game that is consistently cycling through and putting the CPU to good use, yeah, battery life is going to be shorter. Maybe about two and a half, three hours. That's why putting the range in there... because it's more difficult because it's got a wide range of applications to really pinpoint to say, "It's eight hours." Because it could be longer, or it could be shorter, and by dramatic margins up or down.
Click to expand...

ouch man
 
N

neptunes

Member
NC51068.jpg

right after the launch of the SP nintendo came out with an 18hour battery pack
 
D

Daxter Too

Banned
I think it will depends on the game for the battery life, kind of like how Tony Hawk for the GBA sucked the battery dry, more intensive games will do the same.


That said, I would love to see some high quality 2D games on the PSP, a Guilty Gear game would rule!
 
W

Wario64

works for Gamestop (lol)
neptunes said:
GBASP-USB-Battery.jpg


right after the launch of the SP nintendo came out with an 18hour battery pack
Click to expand...


That's not an official product from Nintnedo. 3rd party accessory. Although I think there's a 18 hour battery from Nintendo, but it didn't come out last year, that's for sure
 
J

Jonnyboy117

Member
Three hours is pretty awful. Does this mean you only get ten hours on Mahjong or Solitaire? If battery life sucks for games that tax the system, surely that applies to pretty much everything they've shown so far.
 
W

Wario64

works for Gamestop (lol)
FortNinety said:
GBASP-USB-Battery.jpg


Is that a USB cord? What for if so?
Click to expand...

You can hook up a SP to a laptop/computer to recharge it. But wouldn't the recharge rate be kinda....slow?

john tv said:
Wait, Nintendo has an 18-hour SP battery pack? Wha?
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I don't know, I was just making stuff up. Uhm yeah.

*runs*


I wasn't sure if there was an offiical 18 hour battery
 
Alcibiades

Alcibiades

Member
remember that Kutagari quote about him imagining people playing it at home or inside or something like that...

this kinda backs that up a bit...
 
Alcibiades

Alcibiades

Member
john tv said:
Wait, Nintendo has an 18-hour SP battery pack? Wha?
Click to expand...

actually, without the light on, 18 hours is the official number for the SP battery pack...

10 hours if the light is on...

that said, I haven't charged mine in over 3 weeks and my sister and cousin have been using it and taking it on trips and surprisingly it still going even though it's probably gone over the "official" limit...

I've recharged it less than 35 times though, so the pack it still pretty fresh...
 
Alcibiades

Alcibiades

Member
neptunes said:
what you guys didn't know?

Nintendo released a longer battery pack but I guess everyone was to busy to care.
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I've seen some 3rd party ones that claim to last a lot longer than the Nintendo ones (when I worked at Best Buy), but other than that I never heard anything about Nintendo releasing some, and I check retail places all the time and I've never seen any official Nintendo ones (neither with regular hours or longer hours)...
 
J

jarrod

Banned
I called it...

CPU setting 1: 8-10 hours (ex: DarkStalkers Chronicle, Bust-A-Move)
CPU setting 2: 4-6 hours (ex: Ape Escape, Death Jr)
CPU setting 3: 2-3 hours (ex: GT4 mobile, Dynasty Warriors)

...developers will determine battery expectancy, Sony's being vague on purpose here. Expect more conflicting estimations in the future...
 
N

neptunes

Member
go look for it! (it may not be 18 hours)

but I remember nintendo releasing a battery pack that lasted longer than the one the packaged in with the SP.

it's around somewhere.
 
J

john tv

Member
neptunes said:
not 18 hours but close it I believe.'


go look for it
Click to expand...

Do you want your stay here to be a short one? I already checked Nintendo's site in JP, and there's no mention of any 18-hour pack. The regular pack does 18 with the light off, that's all. So it seems like you're mistaken, unless you can prove otherwise.
 
B

Bebpo

Banned
I don't get this though.

Do people not want portable gaming to advance into 3d with results that look good even by todays standard?

I mean to do all that processing you will eat up the battery fast. There is no way to have small size & reasonable pricing & long battery life where we currently are in technology.

So we either give up and accept that it has a short battery life (which does suck), or we hold out another 5-10 years for a 3d handheld (which would suck even more IMO).

Whether the system ends up being any good or not is an entirely different question. But at least the PSP is going to push the portable gaming market in a direction it really needs to go.
 
B

Belfast

Member
I still don't think it'll be a problem. It sounds like a crappy number, but how many people play games for more than 2-3 hours at a time anyway? As long as the battery can be recharged easily, it shouldn't be a real problem. And if you do play games more than 2-3 hours a day, then I'm sure you've got plenty of other games to play when your PSP's battery dies. :p

So, yeah, while 2-3 at the least (I'm sure other games will last longer) sounds like a bad number, it really doesn't NEED more than that. What made the Game Gear such a pain was that it used AAs (I think). Modern portables are now using rechargables, it would seem, so its not a bad figure.
 
N

neptunes

Member
is people really wanted a graphically superior handheld then the GameGear would have been successful.

I think most people are looking for a balance (price, batterlife, graphics)

I still don't think it'll be a problem. It sounds like a crappy number, but how many people play games for more than 2-3 hours at a time anyway? As long as the battery can be recharged easily, it shouldn't be a real problem. And if you do play games more than 2-3 hours a day, then I'm sure you've got plenty of other games to play when your PSP's battery dies. :p
Click to expand...

It's not the matter of how long one plans to play a game in one sitting. I think it's how long is it until it has to recharge.
 
S

SolidSnakex

Member
neptunes said:
is people really wanted a graphically superior handheld then the GameGear would have been successful.
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As Kaz said in that same interview, what it comes down to is software. And the GG just didn't have the software to compete.
 
D

Daxter Too

Banned
This thread has taken a strange turn.....



ANyways, back on topic, if I can play GT4 on the PSP for at least 5 hours I'll be happy. Sony has some great tech on their side, I woulden't count them out yet.
 
N

neptunes

Member
john tv said:
neptunes - you do realize that the second one is not licensed by Nintendo right?
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the second one is the same type that you use in your gbasp now! (the same voltage power)

As Kaz said in that same interview, what it comes down to is software. And the GG just didn't have the software to compete.
Click to expand...

The Game Gear had games that were leauges beyond the Gameboy (sonic etc...)

even if it did have the games it was going to fail.
 
W

WindyMan

Junior Member
SolidSnakex said:
As Kaz said in that same interview, what it comes down to is software. And the GG just didn't have the software to compete.
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By that logic, the Nomad would have been moderatly succesful, a technologically superior portable with good software. Sucked up the batteries like you wouldn't believe, though.

Of course, Im not saying that the PSP will not be a success due to battery life alone, but you people are forgetting something. Sure, you're playing for three hours, but how long is going to take for you to charge the battery?
 
S

SolidSnakex

Member
WindyMan said:
By that logic, the Nomad would have been moderatly succesful, a technologically superior portable with good software. Sucked up the batteries like you wouldn't believe, though.?
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Hadn't Sega already started their system dumping by then? Start up a system, if wasn't an automatic successs, dump it, jump to another system ect ect. People had already caught onto Sega by then.

Point is the graphics are important. Maybe not enough to make something an automatic success, but they're important enough. And they were definetly needed in the handheld world where all it had was nice 2D and horrible 3D graphics.

Plus as jarrod said, the amount of power a game eats will depend on how much the developer is pushing the game. At the start anyway, there likely aren't going to be too many games that are going to eat up that much battery. There should be bigger batteries by the time those start up.
 
Alcibiades

Alcibiades

Member
I think battery will be critical, even for DS which itself has a multitude of features...

I'm sure it's convenient that people can go days (even weeks if you play a few hours a week only) without recharging like with SP, and that kinda plays into the user-friendliness of the device since it's less of a hassle for people...

I think Sony is lowballing this on purpose (like Nintendo does I'm sure w/ both the SP battery life and Wavebird range), and if the official line turns out to be 5-6 hours for a videogame, then it's will be 7-8 hours...

Companies probably lowball so that consumers know what to expect AT WORST, but know that their products could go above the numbers they give...
 
N

neptunes

Member
man, I'm not going to argue...cause I simply don't care.

All I know is that nintendo officially released a battery pack that is longer than the one they kept with the GBASP.
 
J

john tv

Member
neptunes said:
man, I'm not going to argue...cause I simply don't care.

All I know is that nintendo officially released a battery pack that is longer than the one they kept with the GBASP.
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OK. But you're wrong. :)
 
J

jarrod

Banned
john tv said:
No, the first one is the one that's in my GBA SP now.
Click to expand...
Actually, aren't the standard GBASP batteries only 600 mAH? Meaning this 1000 mAH replacement would be substantially larger?

PSP's standard battery is 1800 mAH btw, DS still hasn't been announced (though I'd expect something around 1200 mAH probably).
 
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