The thing had a bill of materials (BOM) around $820 at launch. They have only just moved into profitability on the hardware.
It's a development and execution environment that runs Playstion games on top of Android, currently I believe PS1 and PSP games and anything new a developer wants to come up with. So as time goes on they could also add the ability to run PS2 and PS3 games in this environment when there is hardware powerful enough to do so. So the PS3 version will be able to run PS1, PSP, NGP games. The NGP version will be able to run PS1 and PSP games. The Xperia play will be able to run PS1 and PSP games. The Nokia Z75VX748 will be able to run PS1 and PSP games.
I'll have to see these facts for myself.
..So its essentially an emulator?
And a development environment, yes! The idea being that developers can work within it to do new stuff even though it emulates older stuff, yet it will run on any Android device over 2.3 made by any certified phone manufacturer and connect to PSN. That's prong one. Prong two is the NGP which will have games that will not run through PS Suite on any other mobile hardware. Prong three is that the PS3 will run NGP games.
It's not complicated to find the numbers.
That actually sounds quite interesting. Maybe, i'm reading it wrong, but are you saying developers could almost tweak or add new things to older games?
Fair enough, i'll have a look at that.
I thought that it was well known that SCEI as a division have bled in the region of $4,000,000,000 on the PS3 project. However, as I said before, it doesn't necessarily mean that Sony Corp as a whole has lost that amount of money (it has driven HDTV takeup and Blu-ray sales), and I don´t believe that it's a 10 year project, more like a 30 year project. PS4 will use Cell (they spent at least $600,000,000 on this alone - it's a very high end CPU even today, nothing much can touch it), TVs will use it, and it goes on.
Quoted for future reference.
I'm not going to lie, that looks absolutely top drawer
I know that it's technically very good and has unbelievable specs, but it's essentially a PS3 that you will be able to move around with. I guess it's good to have one company that sticks to traditional gaming and concentrates on improving specs, this way we will probably have an unbelievably powerful next gen systems that will serve nearly photorealistic graphics, but I appreciate what Nintendo have done with Wii and DS, now 3DS - took a completely different path and sacrificed graphics for something completely new to a wider audience. I'm anticipating 3DS because I want to know what the 3D will be like, expecting it to be good, with new PSP I know exactly what it will be.
It might look as such, but it's nowhere near as powerful as a PS3. Within 3 years top of the range smartphones will have similar guts.
But it will work at lower resolution though, so graphics will be similar, won't they? On current PSP they're between PSX and PS2 but closer to PS2. I imagine it will be the case with a new one too, i.e. between PS2 and PS3.
You do realise Google want to be the next M$ don't you?
The perception of it will be similar, yes, I don't know about effects such as depth of field, screen space ambient occlusion, etc. Animation quality, water simulation, etc. A single SPU on the Cell could probably eat the ARM CPU in this new PSP on its own, and then have enough juice to decode 150 MP3s on the side. This isn't entirely true, but illustrates a point.
I don't have a problem with Microsoft as such, they make my bread and butter after all, and would gain a seal of approval from me if they cut out bloat, were slightly secure here and there, etc. However, I think that they should concentrate a little more on their core market - operating systems and business software. They could for example put more effort and resources into Dynamics and seriously go after Oracle and SAP instead of fannying around with phones, music players, and game consoles. Providing Wndows 7 for ARM is a good move for example, at least they can see that basic mass computing is going more mobile/tablet. What Intel think of this I don't really know, but their traditional bread and butter - the Windows desktop is going to be far less common. POWER 7 (about same theoretical compute performance as Cell on a traditional multi-core OoO processor albeit with 5x the transistor count) and 8 look very tasty from the server/HPC perspective and ARM look as if they are going to take over the world from the mobile perspective.
As I thought, it's not as powerful as an iPhone4.
So what they're doing is setting up an Apple-like ecosystem for games, except the bare requirements seem to be currently slightly higher than your average android/iOS game. Is it like a higher tier, so to speak? I'm not aware about this, but what are the minimum requirements for an Android game, if any? I really can't see this taking off if there are currently none. Unless, of course, they manage to sign up flagship phone models to incorporate the PS Suite. Phones like the HTC Desire 2 or Samsung Galaxy S 2. Then yes, I can see it working for all parties involved. If I were Sony I'd pay for this to happen.
PSP was first released in 2004, over 6 years ago! That's why it's no longer the case. As I said to you before, it will be 3 years at the very least before any generic phone gets anywhere near the NGP.
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