Sony says goodnight to PSP Extended Life Battery Kit

Sony, where's the justice? How could you mercilessly kill the nine month old PSP Extended Life Battery Kit -- capable of boosting the PSP's play time by up to 80% -- while UMDs continue to be the preferred method of distribution for the system's games and video content (thereby also heavily contributing to the device's juice-drain)? Worse still for Sony, why are we not surprised?

[Ichinisan Posted Aug 9th 2008 5:55PM]

It bulges out of the newer PSP Slim, so it wouldn't sell well. They axed it.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 9th 2008 6:13PM]

To be quite honest I feel as if the PSP is becoming more and more useless....I mean, with the PS3 out and obviously new consoles like the Xbox360 from Microsoft, it feels like Sony have just abandoned the hand held market and left old sub-standard technology with it. I wouldn't be surprised if they stopped making PSP games soon too.

James
http://www.joshisasian.com

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 9th 2008 7:42PM]

Honestly, I see a lot of people giving Sony crap for their policy on homebrew on the PSP, and I'm not sure they necessarily deserve it, since a main use of things such as the M33 firmware (at least for me) is running ISO's. But then again, we've seen people like Dark-AleX who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what the PSP can do. I'm not really sure what this had to do with the battery now that I think about it...

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 9th 2008 8:38PM]

It's just a thought, but I think Sony might be getting rid of this pack to replace it with a smaller one that actually FITS in the battery slot without needing a different battery cover. Just a thought.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 10th 2008 5:19AM]

The reactions in the comments go from shock to lack of shock, but none of them seem to understand WHY they're getting rid of it.

The PSP extended battery kit comes with 2 plastic backs for black and silver in a box, along with ANOTHER package, a blister pack this time, with a whole separate UPC code and marketing materials. This pack is for a PSP-1000 battery pack to upgrade from 1800 to 2200, boldly printed on it was the claim that you could get a whole *20%* extra out of it over the regular battery pack which it got by getting rid of the embossed plastic and going for a painted on logo. For $30-35 this was a tough sell, and I'm sure Sony had tons of these still in their warehouse when the PSP-2000 was released.

Instead of dumping them in a landfill, they figured they could toss in a cheap piece of plastic and sell them with the newly updated *80%* extra battery life for these. Much more tempting and it appears that they sold fairly well. They have probably run out of their stock of PSP-1000 2200mah batteries, perhaps at a loss, and decided to end the thing.

Maybe their tax system in japan doesn't let them write things off like companies do in the US?

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 11th 2008 10:35AM]

Doesn't everyone just run their games from the memory stick, anyway? Oops...