News E3: Sony announces PlayStation handheld

Ooh - this sounds nice:

This is the Walkman of the 21st Century," said Ken Kutaragi, as journalists amassed at Sony's pre-E3 conference stood there gazing, dumbfounded at the wily SCE chief. PlayStation Portable, or PSP, due out in Q4 2004, finally signals Sony's large-scale entry into the handheld gaming market. And we have a hunch they'll give Nintendo a run for their money where the likes of SNK have failed in the past.

Although Sony has yet to show anybody what PSP looks like (they themselves may not yet know), we do know quite a lot about the technology behind it. It will play games from Universal Media Discs (UMD), which are 1.8GB, 60mm optical discs housed in a minidisk-style plastic cartridge, and like GBA there will be no region encoding (although given Sony's active role in restricting importers, we wouldn't put it past them to worm something in). The console will be powered by the latest 90nm semiconductor technology, with PSone-surpassing graphics under the control of NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline), and a capacity for around two hours of high resolution MPEG4-based FMV "at DVD quality", all of which will be pumped out onto a 4.5", 480x272 pixel TFT LCD widescreen (16:9 aspect ratio). It is also expected that the button layout will eventually resemble DualShock, with a few changes made to fit the smaller size of the console.

Makes a Gameboy SP look pretty old hat, huh? Of course, Microsoft will follow up with a mobile version of the XBOX, but something that small and dense would end up warping the fabric of space-time....

Full Register article here