Sony Corp. launched its PlayStation Portable into the North American market Wednesday, with hopes of attracting a broader audience than traditional gamers and reversing declining sales within its consumer electronics division.
*So who is buying it?? *
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The handheld device runs video games, digital video and music files, photos and movies and will sell for about $300. The PSP is significantly larger than a smart cellphone or BlackBerry, but still small enough to stash in a large pocket or purse. The 4.3-inch wide screen provides small but incredibly sharp images, with the capacity to display 16.8 million colours.
I’m a little concerned about this though
While the PSP will play industry standard MP3 music files, Sony decided to use its own proprietary standard for storing games and movies, called Universal Media Disc. The discs are smaller than DVDs and boast more than twice the capacity of regular CDs. But only one movie title has been released in UMD format, Spider-Man 2, from Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., and just 24 game titles exist.
- Interesting specs *
The PSP will feature Dolby 7.1 multi-channel audio, with 3D sound. It will support MP3, AAC and Sony’s own ATRAC3 sound formats. It uses AVC (H.264) and MPEG4 for video. The machine’s UMD media can hold up to two hours’ of DVD-quality video or four hours ‘standard’ quality, whatever that is. Either way, movies are displayed on the unit’s 4.5in 16:9 widescreen ratio 480 x 272-pixel LCD, seen here.
One of the key features of the PSP is 802.11b wireless networking for multi-player gaming. However, speaking at a news conference yesterday, Kutaragi said Sony will at some point add phone facilities, bringing the device even more into line with Nokia’s console-cum-phone N-Gage.