Final PSP details confirmed: launch date, price, software and battery-life detailed inside!

As I suspected the 2 hour battery life scare stories were to soften the blow, so now 5-6 hours doesn't seem so bad, even though they said 10 hours at E3.

Not a bad price tho.

Having seen the press release and the MCV story, the conditions attached to the battery life stipulate full brightness on the screen. I'll bet you could get closer to 10 hours with the backlight turned down. Probably not the full 10, but I'd have thought at least seven or eight.

I'm really not worried about battery life.

I only plan to own a PSP in order to carry it around with me, to show how afluent and cool I am.

Using it in "restricted utility" mode, with the power switch in the "off" position, turning it to on only briefly to impress memeber of the proler... prool... poor people who don't own a PSP, I expect to have significantly extended battery life.

Great news regarding the price and battery life. The only thing that can ruin this are lack of launch titles. For £130 I'd snap one up on launch, if it had the software to go with it... if not, I'll wait a while until the price drops and there's more software.

Thats alot of good promises and news from Sony. TBH im really glad to hear it as the PSP defintely has something more there for the older games such as myself.

Hopefully the price tag stays low for the UK but there is nothing to indicate that it wont. Good news indeed. :D

I'd buy one for that price, at least the feedback has paid off for all our rantings of PSP being over priced.

I'm getting both DS and PSP so this makes it easier for me.

The battery life issue is still problem for me, when you are playing a game 6 hours passes like 3 hours. Also the accessories will cause a problem. 6 hours will be like playing GG all over again, but if it can last longer then that's good.

Despite my pouring scorn on the Sony camp, I don't do it for the sake of it, and I suppose they haven't met all of their promises but meeting us half way will have to do.

5-6 hours of battery life seems reasonable enough, I guess. Certainly enough for the fabled "long car journey".

The big news here is the price. It's pretty impressive - Sony's going to be taking the fight to Nintendo on this battlefield. Personally, I wonder if Sony is losing money on this - and if it is, how much? Something tells me that Sony isn't going to be bothered by losing some money to completely corner the market for gaming systems. It's certainly the same tactic Microsoft used to get it's foothold in the console market, and could serve Sony well.

The race just got closer, and far more interesting.

I hear you, the price is better so at least they sorted that out.

Launch of PSP still creates probs for me. PSP 130-150 quid, Memory stick = 20-30 quid, and one or two games = 80 quid.

My wallet screams in pain, but that's only because I'm not currently working. The DS will have to come first then just on what I will be spending to get started.

Anyone know if it's going to be region locked or not yet? That's always been the one of the most attractive attributes of the Game Boy family for me, and the DS is apparently not going to break with this honourable tradition

And you might even want to get an extra spare battery as well... they'll prolly work out at about £30 each.

Apparently so.

I only asked after I already had one in my basket at Lik Sang. But SPOnG bods Thwaite and Rox reckon it is, and their word is good enough for me!

Damn bad news though, I rilly rilly wanted one before Christmas, but I can't be bothered with all that game importing and guessing my way through Japanese user-interfaces crap.

Hmm, I've heard rumours that that is the case also. But we were discussing it on a mailgroup here at work, and one of the programmers said there was no region lock on games, with a quiet yet secretive certainty that suggested he knew for sure.

I still doubt him though - Game Boys don't need regions cause they just play games, but cause of the other stuff PSPs do then they'll need some sort of OS, which would probably involve languages, and I'm sure Sony wouldn't have hung around getting all 600 European languages on it when they are hustling to get it out early in Japan. But then even if there did have to be a different machine for each region, that doesn't necessarily mean they couldn't play games from others. Though knowing Sony it probably would....

Hello? This is SONY. It'll be region locked. You get nothing for free.

I have a feeling the battery life may be "varying"; that claim may not factor in loading etc. So games that load more, drain more.

And they could teach the damn thing to tap dance and i still wouldn't buy it. Why?

Memory Stick. The world's least reliable/stable/hard-wearing storage medium ever. They snap, they malfunction, they generally wear out. No thankyou.

But if you buy one before EU or US launch, that's all the games you will have to choose from, even if it is region-unlocked.

The original JP release of PS2 had region free DVD playback.

Of course, this was changed for the western territories, but my point is that one shouldn't take it for granted that PSP will be completely locked down.

Perhaps region encoding will be at the discretion of the developer/publisher, as region encoding on DVD video software is.

Anyway, Da Moss is close to sources at a pretty well known publisher/developer, so I'm certainly not discarding what he's been told.