Sony: NGP battery life "good, solid"

Sony has described the battery life of the Next Generation Portable – unveiled this morning at a Tokyo press conference - as "solid".

Eurogamer heard this morning that Sony's PlayStation Portable successor will last between four and five hours before a charge is required.

While SCEE boss Andrew House was unable to confirm the snazzy handheld's battery life when quizzed by Eurogamer, he did explain why gamers shouldn't be concerned by it.

"We'll have a good, solid battery life because of two factors," he said. "It's influenced our choice of flash media, versus incorporating a disc drive; and number two, the screen is large and gorgeous – it's also OLED, which is fantastically good for low power consumption as well.

"So there are two, I think strong, features there that bode very well for battery life."

The NGP's screen resolution is four times that of the original PlayStation Portable, which displayed images at 480x272. The device uses a "new game medium", what Sony calls a small flash memory based card dedicated for NGP software titles.

"Taking advantage of the flash memory feature, this innovative card can store the full software titles plus add-on game content or the game save data directly on to the card," Sony revealed today. "By adopting flash memory based card, SCE will be able to provide game cards with higher capacity in the future, allowing developers to store more game data to deliver rich and immersive games."

Sony UK told Eurogamer that details on the battery life are unavailable at this stage.

A full charge of the Nintendo 3DS is said to provide between three and five hours worth of fun.