Sony announced this week that it will take on the market-leading Nintendo GameBoy with a new handheld video game system called the PSP (PlayStation Portable) that features advanced graphics capabilities, a widescreen display, and a small DVD-like disk drive. Additionally, the consumer electronics giant said that it was slashing the price of its PlayStation 2 (PS2) video game console and releasing a new version, at the old price point, that includes the broadband networking adapter it used to sell separately, in a bid to counter-attack one of the Xbox's more obvious advantages over the PS2.
"There's a new member of the [PlayStation] family, and it's not the PlayStation 3," said Ken Kutaragi, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and the so-called Father of the PlayStation, referring to the PSP. "The baby is still in the incubator, but as the father I can look in the window and see his face, and he is very cute." The PSP will ship around the tenth anniversary of the original PlayStation, he said, and will be "the Walkman for the 21st century."
The PSP will debut late in 2004, the company said during briefings this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. It will feature several innovative features, including a 5.4-inch 16:9 widescreen backlit LCD display with a resolution of 480 x 272 pixels and will utilize a use a new DVD-like disc format Sony calls UMD. UMD disks, about half the physical size of a DVD, will hold 1.8 GB of data, or almost three times the storage capacity of a CD-ROM. The PSP will also include stereo speakers, USB 2.0 ports, a laptop-like rechargeable lithium ion battery, 3D graphics capabilities, and MPEG-4 video support.
On the video game console front, Sony dropped the price of its PS2 console to $180 from $200 and introduced a new version of the console for $200; this new console includes the broadband networking adapter, a built-in IR receiver, and better DVD movie playback capabilities. While critics might charge that Sony is simply trying to meet some of the technological advantages in its primary competitor, the Xbox, the company wasn't offering much in the way of kudos for its competition: Instead, Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment US, declared victory for the PS2 in "the battle for [video game] console supremacy." Predictably, as I write this, reports about Xbox price cuts are starting to filter in as Microsoft moves to counter the effects of Sony's announcement.