Sony's PSP ran its processor at two-thirds speed to save the battery
The PlayStation Portable was the most powerful handheld of its day, yet for years Sony throttled its chips to stretch battery life and fought a spinning optical disc that drained power and loaded slowly. It still sold over 80 million units, more than any handheld not made by Nintendo.
Nintendo had owned portable gaming since the Game Boy in 1989. Sega's Game Gear, Bandai's WonderSwan, SNK's Neo Geo Pocket and Nokia's N-Gage all failed to dent that lead, and Sony's own first attempt, the PocketStation of 1999, stayed in Japan. When Sony announced the PSP before E3 2003, chief executive Ken Kutaragi pitched it as the Walkman of the 21st century, a machine for films and music as well as games. An IDC analyst called it the first legitimate threat to Nintendo in the handheld market.
Its defining oddity was the Universal Media Disc, making the PSP the only handheld to rely on an optical format as its main storage. Games and movies both shipped on UMD. The drive ate battery and read slowly, so developers had to arrange data carefully to avoid disc access, and some scenes in WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006 took up to two minutes to load. Sony also capped the two 333 MHz processors, locking games at 222 MHz until a firmware update in May 2007 let developers push higher. Later models added a disc cache and allowed partial installs to memory cards.
Launch demand was fierce. More than 200,000 units sold on the first day in Japan in December 2004, and Sony claimed 500,000 in two days in North America despite a price of 249 dollars, over 100 dollars more than the Nintendo DS. The European launch was delayed to September 2005 by demand elsewhere, and in Britain every unit sold out within three hours.
Sony later slimmed the design, cutting the weight from 280 to 189 grams in the 2007 PSP-2000. Hardware shipments ended in 2014, the PlayStation Vita took over as successor, and the last Japanese factory producing UMDs closed in late 2016.
Source: PlayStation Portable
