Sony Narrows Date for PSP Launch

Sony has provided a little more detail into the launch schedule of its much-anticipated PSP handheld gaming device.

The company had previously stated that it plans to launch the device worldwide in the fourth quarter of this year. However, Chris Deering, the recently appointed president of Sony Europe, said in an interview with the company's PlayStation.com Web site that the current schedule calls for a November launch.

"There's no official date for its unveiling, but it has been announced that the target date for its global launch is November 2004, so I'm pretty sure it'll be widely announced plenty of time ahead of that," he was quoted as saying.

A spokesperson at Sony Computer Entertainment, the subsidiary responsible for the company's gaming business, downplayed the interview and said that the official launch date remains the fourth quarter of this year and is no more precise than that.

But she stopped short of saying that Deering was wrong in identifying November as the probable launch month.

Technical Details

Few details are currently available about the gaming device, though Sony did show a design concept during an investor conference in New York in November 2003.

Earlier in 2003 at the E3 show, where the PSP was first announced, the company revealed that it will include a 4.5-inch, wide-screen TFT LCD with a resolution of 480 by 272 pixels, 3D graphics, support for MPEG4 video, and a USB 2.0 port.

Sony also said that the player will use a new media format called Universal Media Disc (UMD). The 2.4-inch optical discs will be encased in a cartridge and will hold up to 1.8GB of data, the company said at the time.