You won't get any new features o­n these, and you lose your in-line remote control and USB cradle, but you'll find that there are new colors.

Also, the price has dropped nearly $100 USD.

Traditionally, button-type batteries have contained Mercury. I'm pretty sure Mercury is o­ne of the most harmful substances to life, so anything that DOESN'T contain it should be better than something that DOES.

By "button-type" I mean those small batteries...like the o­ne in your wristwatch.

It's interesting to know that the optical recording head of a Blu-Ray drive will cost 100,000 yen, just for a sample.
Or at least I thought it was interesting.

This page proves it: http://www.playstation.jp/tgs2004/psp_spec.html

Since the UMD drive inside the PSP is read-only, we can assume that you won't be able to burn your own UMD discs using the PSP itself. I'm sure Sony hasn't got plans for a UMD burner, so to me, this announcement means you'll be playing MP3s off your Memory Stick Duo. Duo goes up to 1GB for the time being.

One more thing I just noticed is "region" is listed under "access controls." Well shit, this means we won't be playing imported games, I think.

For those of you that don't know, contrast ratio describes the difference between the whitest whites and blackest blacks a screen can display.
The LCD I'm using right now has a contrast ratio of 250:1 - so 6000:1 is a shitload, needless to say.

Sony apparently developed this MPEG codec LSI which uses a 90nm production process...pretty nice. Somehow they fit a CPU and memory in there as well.
I remember when I got my ATI "All-in-Wonder" a few years ago, it required a Pentium II 450MHz or above in order to be able to encode MPEG-2 video realtime.

This single chip can not o­nly do that, but it can also decode at the same time. I'd like to see it do MPEG-4 or even H.264, but I guess that's still a bit too far off.

You'll never see this in America, since Sony has stopped releasing new Clies over here. But who cares, it's not like anyone (in this country) would be willing to drop $900 o­n a PDA.

There's plenty of information surfacing in other places about the new lineup of Vaio laptops and desktops announced today, so unless I have an enormous amount of time tonight because the sun doesn't go down or something, I won't be covering them.

But I wouldn't want to go without calling attention to them. So I instead will be offering up a boatload of images. Gotta use that 60GB of bandwith somehow, right?

56k users beware.

More new Memory Sticks from Sony.
Also, 2GB model is due out in November.

Pretty straightforward, except for the colors of course.