Hmmmmm.... I don't mind so much that SONY perhaps tries to venture into the handheld gaming market if their entry is a very potent product. Im talking about a fast 32bit CPU, 3D capabilities that match and surpass those of PSone , storage based on a cheaply produced media like the minidics and nothing like the expensive cartridges that Nintendo uses and last but not least its size should be NO BIGGER than the current GBA.
One thing to bear in mind is that the advantage of cartridges is that they are extremely fast and therefor their content need not be copied into local memory. But minidisc is a disc based media (which the name kind if gives away) and is therefor inherently slow so any console using this for storage would need to have a lot of memory. The Playboy (he he
thats a nice name for a handheld. Get it? Handheld) should use at least 8mb (mega bytes not those damned mega bits) or more of internal memory. This shouldnt be a problem as memory is dirt cheap and there is no excuse to be greedy when it comes to this crucial component. And as long as Im dreaming lets go ahead and slap a backlit OLED screen on this baby because it makes sense, well at least it makes sense to me if I was building a handheld and load it with a good sound processor.
Next we have the issue of battery life and using my SONY netMD portable minidisc player as a reference I can say that using minidiscs as storage should not be problematic. But once you throw in the RAM, CPU, GPU, sound chip and screen you could potentially run into problems if you didnt do things right. The screen shouldnt cause so much trouble since the OLED trademark is its uncanny low power consumption compared to LCD and other display technologies. Im not going to stand here and pretend like knowing how much less power it uses but if it keeps being mentioned I thinks its significant. Lastly we have the three chips and as I understand it the smaller you make a chip the lower will its power consumption be, so all SONY needs to do is to shrink this chips as much as possible using the newest manufacturing technologies so to lower power consumption. As with the RAM
what the hell do I know? Im not going to do all of work for those damned SONY engineers let them come up with a idea for a change.
But since we as opposed to Neo dont live in a dream world Im going to pretend that even after all the above techniques and more have been implemented to combat power consumption this baby still sucks more than a 2 dollar hooker on speed trying desperately to meet her pimps quota. So what do we do? Simple we pack this bad boy with a mobile phone like rechargeable battery that enables us to squeeze 10h of gaming out of it before a recharge is needed.
Lets pretend that I pack all of these ideas up in a document, hire a lawyer to help me write a disclaimer that gives SONY the right to use all the ideas within without giving me jack so they can legally look at it and not just send it back. I then proceed to sending the whole package to a SONY executive that takes credit for the idea and gets promoted at the next meeting in addition to getting clearance to go ahead with research and production ASAP. Lets continue our daydream by pretending that SONY builds a prototype and manages to convince a lot of the PSOne big players of the days past that this little wonder will be a cash cow for PSOne game ports and sequels and manages to secure a sizeable amount of exclusive third party content. We are talking about ports or sequels to such hard hitters as Final fantasy, Metal Gear and quality titles like Symphony of the night. If things come to pass more or less exactly as I have described them then and only then will SONY have a chance to rival and even surpass Nintendo in the handheld market.
Jesus! Im getting a little turned on writing my deepest, darkest and filthiest fantasies about the ultimate handheld except for the one we are all borne with, well the men anyway.
Alas this is just that, a fantasy which will never come to pass and in reality the products that M$ and SONY will come out with will not even be in the same dimension as my hypothetical machine. They most likely will be plagued by the same problem that killed and buried the other handhelds such as size, battery life and a lack of innovation, appeal and titles so Nintendo will stay at the top.