Last week, Sony’s PlayStation Director of Hardware Marketing, John Koller, said the new, brighter PSP-3000 would suffer a battery life loss of up to half an hour. Now he’s furiously backtracking.
I’d like to make a correction and clarify that the new PSP will have equivalent battery life to the current PSP, about 4 to 6 hours for games and about 4 to 5 hours for UMD videos. While the enhanced screen of the new PSP draws a little more power, our engineers in Japan worked to reduce the power consumption of the overall system including its components, so you won’t have to worry about losing any time when enjoying the more vibrant visuals displayed with the new PSP.
That’s nice to hear, but it certainly doesn’t gel with what Koller was saying just last week. Nothing could have possibly changed in the design since then.
Speculation: the sentence “our engineers in Japan worked to reduce the power consumption of the overall system” is a bit weasely. According to Famitsu, the new PSP-3000 firmware will featurea setting which will allow you to ramp back the color and brightness to PSP-2000 levels. My guess is that Koller’s backpedaling, but if you want to play on a lower-power mode, at least that option’s available to you.
New PSP’s Battery Life Equivalent to Current PSP [PlayStation Blog]
Oh good.
-because battery life was really the main issue.
(?)
It may just be that he was wrong. He’s a spokesman, not an engineer in charge of battery life. It could be that the engineers had gotten it all worked out, but word hadn’t made it to the marketing guys. That sort of thing can happen. Until users and reviewers have their hands on things, there’s no way to know.