Although Playstation Portable, known formally as the PSP, won’t be available until the fourth quarter of 2004, it could shake up the handheld market. Specs include:
An LCD about 4.5 inches wide, with 480 x 272-dot resolution; a 60-mm-diameter disk system; and a proprietary Sony system called Universal Media Disc (UMD), all powered by the PSP engine consisting of two MIPS R4000 CPUs. WiFi is included as standard equipment.
The two processors operate in the range of 1 MHz to 333 MHz at 1.2 volts. Advanced Video Coding (H.264) was adopted as the video coding format for PSP. The 6-centimeter-diameter UMD system, has a 1.8-Gbyte capacity using a red laser and two-layered-disk structure, can store the equivalent of about two hours of video content that’s of the same quality as DVD images.
In a year, $200 DVD-quality wireless handhelds, similar to the Archos Multimedia handheld, will hit the streets. They’ll be hungry.
BTW, Microsoft may offer a wireless Xbox adapter this Christmas. It will compete with the Linksys’ WGA54G Wireless-G Game Adapter and similar products.
Further out, Sony plans a grid-connected “cell” console in 2005. IBM will make the processor and is currently taking supercomputing to the next level with the development of a chip capable of handling one trillion operations per second.
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