Sony has said that the PSP 3000’s battery life isn’t shorter than the juice time available on the current PSP Slim & Lite, contrary to earlier statements that the battery life of the handheld will decrease by 20-30 minutes due to the brighter screen.

Director of Hardware Marketing John Koller said last week that “the new PSP will have equivalent battery life to the current PSP”.

That means PSP-3000 gamers will get between 4 and 6 hours’ play time for PSP games, and between 4 and 5 hours of runtime when watching UMD videos.

Earlier in the week, Koller stated in an interview that the PSP-3000’s battery would only last about 3.5 to 4 hours.

Koller still says that the PSP 3000’s “enhanced screen” draws a little more power than normal. However, he adds that engineers in Japan worked to reduce the power consumption of the overall system without sacrificing display quality.

Now it’ll be interesting to see if this has come at the cost of any of the other features - for example, maybe the volume will have a lower cap or perhaps those LED power lights won’t glow quite as bright.

We can only hope that the new handheld lives up to the expectations of the PSP gamer.

If you liked this story, you might want to check out & bookmark the PSP game downloads.