Tretton: Sony Considering PSP with Harddrive

[Shrygue]

via Kotaku


Sony has thought about and continues to play around with the idea of building a Playstation Portable with a built in hard drive or internal memory, Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, said this morning at a gather of game writers.

"I think we definitely thought about it," he said. "I think that's the trend moving forward."

With the recently announced ability to purchase movies on a Playstation 3 and move them over to a Playstation Portable, and as the cost of memory continues to drop, the chance that a new Playstation Portable would include some sort of internal storage option is becoming increasingly likely, Tretton said.

New of the push toward digitally distributed movies through the Playstation Store is also like to impact UMD's already flagging movie sales, he added.

"I think the UMD has struggled," he said. "And that's an understatement. That's been a very frustrating thing. I don't think (UMD movies) were handled very effectively."

He said it seemed that studios said "lets see if we can get people to pay $20 or $30 for crappy movies with less content."

Digital distributed movies, he said, is either going to supplement the UMD movie's struggle or be the "stake in the UMD's heart."

[alentris]

An internal hard drive would be a godsend. And one of the first smart things from sony for the psp.

[noname1]

Why should they do that?
The PSP already has memory card support and what can we put on the hard-drive movies? music? demo's? I think it's a bit lame and the slim isn't out that long.
why would they create a new one? and what kind of harddrive would they put in the psp?
A spinning one?
No they are fragile and heavy.

[pspmodel1001]

Something like what the iPod Video uses, it's small and has enough mem for all my PS1 and PSP games.

[MicroNut]

Unless its an SSD it really doesn't make much sense does it?

[pspmodel1001]

Well SSD don't have as much mem. I like the idea but, yeah pretty much makes no sence.

[jamotto]

Would have to offset the hard drive with a larger capacity battery or more power efficient PSP or both.

[TheRisingExodus]

agreed at this time its not logical to have a actual harddrive in the PSP thats mechanical due to two factors which are weight and power consumption. and if SSD its going to raise the price of the unit up and it would not be very high compacity. I say sony stick to UMDs cause your going to have to do a good deal of hardware revision to fit a small high compacity memory device in the PSP with the UMD drive still there for games. what sony needs to do is make a portable UMD player (not psp) thats got realy good battery life and easier to store so that consumers can have movies (like the portable DVD player but with much better battery life and more room for extra goodies)

[trafony]

Just keep making bigger flash memory cards and bringing the prices down. Hard drive would be silly.

[pkmaximum]

Ya SSD would be the only good solution imo.... but very expensive for a descent amount of memory, I doubt SONY could do such a thing......