November 1^st, 2004 (11:08am) - Sony Computer Entertainment’s Ken Kutaragi has revealed in an interview with Japanese site Impress PC Watch that the PSP battery life statistics released by SCE last week are misleading. The revealed stats told members of the press and future consumers that game’s on the PSP would run from four to six hours, however, it seems that Sony has twisted the facts.

Kutaragi-san has stated that "a puzzle game will last longer, but Ridge Racer will probably be shorter than that," and that these figures quoted by SCE are based on playing the handheld with headphones, without its wireless multiplayer capabilities, and with the screen’s brightness set at a specific level. This means that the initial reports from May’s E3 stating that a fully-powered PSP would have a battery life of two hours, may have indeed been true.

Kutaragi-san is promising that the battery issues will be resolved in the future, citing Sony’s past efforts to improve the battery life of the Walkman. However, Sony is enforcing that video game developers stay away from continously streaming data from the PSP’s UMD (as done with the majority of PS2 games) due to the fact that doing so would drain a great amount of the PSP’s battery.

In similar news, Sony has announced that they plan on shipping 3 million units of the PSP within the financial year.