PSP Battery Life – Hands-on Truth Revealed Inside!

Insert drum roll here as key question answered inside.

Posted by Staff
PSP Battery Life – Hands-on Truth Revealed Inside!
The PSP launched in Japan on Sunday, at the stroke of midnight on Saturday to be precise, and gamers set about scurrying home to test/make love to the delicious new Sony portable.

And of course, the key question was, and to an extent still is: how long does the battery last when the PSP is used for gaming?

Reports we have been receiving have placed the power performance at around the three hour mark. All units have been using Namco’s delicious Ridge Racers with speaker sound, and gamers have reported an average of 2 hours and 40 minutes game time. Using headphones, the duration crept up to a shade over three hours and ten minutes.

Video playback battery life performance is currently unconfirmed.
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Comments

SPInGSPOnG 13 Dec 2004 12:28
1/8
Well it's not the unmitigated disaster we'd feared. But it's not the trans-atlantic flight I'd hoped.

And reports on the life while playing a movie - were any movies available at J-launch?
acidviper 13 Dec 2004 13:01
2/8
FFS give us more info. What was screenbrightness? Was WIFI on? What kind of matches were u playing. Gamespot reported at worst 90 minutes with Ridge Racers with WIFI off. Ridge Racers is kind of a stupid game to pick because it has long load times. So is it load times and game performance that drains the batteries? You have to have another game for comparison.
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russta 13 Dec 2004 14:42
3/8
We charged up the battery and slammed the hell out of Ridge Racers with medium screen brightness (too bright hurts your eyes anyway) all over Shinjuku and it took -- I s**t you not -- SIX HOURS AND THREE MINUTES for the battery to die. No joke. Put that on your weblogs.

http://forums.insertcredit.com/viewtopic.php?p=72495&highlight=#72495

According to this PSP owner the battery time doesn't sound so bad.
tyrion 13 Dec 2004 18:55
4/8
acidviper wrote:
FFS give us more info. What was screenbrightness? Was WIFI on? What kind of matches were u playing.

Bear in mind we haven't got ours yet, but most of the reports claim mid brightness and volume and without wi-fi turned on.

acidviper wrote:
Ridge Racers is kind of a stupid game to pick because it has long load times.

I agree that RR is gonna suffer due to accessing the UMD for each track, maybe even a bit of spooling off the UMD if there is a lot of scenery. I think it was picked as it is seen as a typical PSP game, also it's one of the highest profile launch titles.
tyrion 13 Dec 2004 19:01
5/8
russta wrote:
SIX HOURS AND THREE MINUTES

Yeah, we saw that and discussed this claim before, during and after posting our story.

It's the only story that claims anywhere near that length of playtime and the poster is accused of being a bit of a Sony whore later in the thread. This was in direct response to claims on other sites of the 1.5-3 hour figures.

Edit:
Just noticed after reading the Insert Credit forum thread again, the posting bloke is Tim Rogers, who has a rep as a Nintendo journalist. However, he's also selling some PSPs and advertising in the same forum thread.

Make your own minds up guys, it's a tough one to call.

[13 Dec 2004, 19:21: Message edited by 'tyrion']
Pandaman 13 Dec 2004 21:34
6/8
I've been blind-sided by this. I had no idea the PSP was coming out even remotely soon; much less today. Although technically, every game the PSP has is already out on the PS2, so its not big loss.

BA-DUM-PSSS!
vulcan4d 14 Dec 2004 01:01
7/8
So far the word is 3 hours on residual charge (out of the box) or fully charged and set on full brightness. A number of individuals reported 6 hours of Ridge Racer at medium brightness. Read the article over at lik-sang and update your site.
http://www.lik-sang.com/news.php?artc=3548
tyrion 14 Dec 2004 13:32
8/8
vulcan4d wrote:
So far the word is 3 hours on residual charge (out of the box) or fully charged and set on full brightness. A number of individuals reported 6 hours of Ridge Racer at medium brightness. Read the article over at lik-sang and update your site.
http://www.lik-sang.com/news.php?artc=3548

This article is also by Tim Rogers, the poster of the above-mentioned six hour claim.

No-one else has reported anything like that sort of time with Ridge Racers. The IGN PSP battery jounal claims about 4.75 hours with general usage like MP3s and a various set of games.

Six and a bit hours is just so far outside anybody else's claims that we have to wonder about Mr. Rogers' motivations given that he is selling PSPs on the Insert Credit forum thread mentioned above.
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