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Procrastinato on 15 October 2009
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max power said:
Procrastinato said:
Keep in mind that the reason the PSP's battery only lasts "3-6 hours", is due to its enormous CPU/GPU battery usage, and hefty clock (333 MHz CPU, 160 MHz GPU), relative to the DS (66 + 33 MHz CPUs), and DSi(133 and 66 MHz CPUs).

Like all high-end electronics, the tegra is gets more power hungry at higher clocks. If Nintendo is gunning for more than a PSP-esque battery life, the DS 2 will probably be on par with a GameCube, in terms of performance (the DS being roughly on par with the N64).

Also, if Nintendo announces this in late 2010, you can surely expect it within a year's time. They'd be pretty foolish to announce the successor to a platform earlier than that, given that DS sales will probably drop off considerably after the announcement.

DS 2 == late 2011. On par with GameCube, and probably on par with Apple's next iTouch.

DS/DSlite/DSi have 850/1000/840mAh batteries.

PSP 1000/2000/3000 have 1500/1800/2200mAh

 

Nintendo certainly has room to upgrade, but yeah... there is certainly an advantage in terms of battery life to not use state-of-the-art hardware.

 

However, there are also hardware advances in terms of low power processors (look at the Intel Atom), as well as battery tech... so who knows.

Just for clarity, the PSP-1000/2000/3000/Go batteries are (respectively):

1800, 1200, 1200, ~900 mAh, which is basically the reason that the PSP's battery life duration continues to be the same, rather than increasing while power usage decreases.  The 2200 mAh battery was an extended pack, offered as an extra.  There was no 1500 mAh battery, that I know of.

Battery tech, sadly, moves at a snail's pace.  We won't be seeing super-batteries anytime soon. =(

In retrospect, I think Nintendo may even chop the clock to where the DS 2 probably isn't much faster than the current PSP, in terms of CPU, but perhaps has a bit more graphics horsepower.  Honestly, there's no reason for Nintendo to up the bar past that, for the DS 2, since an upgrade to the PSP's specs would be a pretty hefty upgrade, for even a DSi.  If they do downclock the device, you can bet they will allow some apps (i.e. exclusive contracts) to hike the clock for their game, just to show off the DS 2's capabilities, and make it look like its both as-powerful-as, and has a longer battery, than its competition... even though the latter and the former won't be true together.