Playing into your hands

With the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, you can hold the combined power of gaming, multimedia and communications in your palms.

By N S Sawaikar

Sony PSP

The growing versatility and power of hand-held devices have led to a blurring of divisions between gaming, multimedia and communications. The Sony PSP is a great example of this; though primarily a gaming machine, it also has solid multimedia and networking capabilities.

Sony PSP The core of the PSP is its processor, the most powerful in any hand-held gaming device, which can deliver excellent graphics close to those of a PS2. You can watch those graphics on a widescreen 4.3-inch LCD screen: again the largest in hand-held gaming. The PSP features a new media format called UMD that can store not just games but also movies and music, making it a multimedia playback device. The PSP can also connect to wireless networks for both online gaming and regular web-browsing.

The Sony PSP doesn’t come cheap. The unit costs about Rs 20,000 and games can cost as much as Rs 2,500. As a relatively new platform, there are fewer games than Nintendo’s Gameboy Advance. However, prices will eventually fall and the Sony PSP is slowly building a library of quality games like the action shootout game Syphon Filter and the racing game Ridge Racer.

Nintendo DS

The Nintendo DS isn’t a high-powered multimedia machine like the Sony PSP, but it’s arguably the more ground-breaking product of the two. DS stands for dual-screen and the most obvious innovation is a second LCD screen to go along with the main one. Depending on the title, the second screen may show maps, information or alternative views of the game. Furthermore, the screen is touch-sensitive and the unit comes with a stylus which gives you a fun, new way to control gameplay more precisely than the usual buttons.

The DS also comes with a more powerful processor and higher resolution screens than the Gameboy Advance, which allows for much better graphics. It’s wireless-enabled, with a range of 30-100 feet, and comes with a built-in application called Pictochat which lets you chat with other users through text or pictures.

The DS is backward-compatible with the Gameboy Advance, so you can play the large number of existing GBA titles. It is also gradually building up its own library of quality titles, including the recently released Super Mario Bros game and Advance Wars (DS), the latest release in a popular strategy game series.

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Playing into your hands

Sony PSP

Nintendo DS

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