on the contrary. Standby mode uses no power, and you can usually activate it while in game, and then return to that spot later with no appreciable power drain. that is, none that affects the system's self-diagnostic of how much battery life is left. shame on Gamespot for not being gamers enough to know this. i do not argue the test results, simply the factor they tested.
This is starting to get ridiculous, and its fairly obvious that people don't read the enitre comments section before they post. so- once again, please ignore this article. for questionable reasons, Gamespot has chosen to use the cold-start times. This is the equivalent of turning off your PC, and then timing how long it takes for it to start back up fully and navigate to this page. Why the hell would you do that if you can just get here when the PC is on, or from the internet browser/desktop? Much the same is the PSP's sleep/standby function. when you can flick the power button to go to what's basically a screensaver/powersave mode and/or switch games while the console is on, you don't NEED to do a cold start every time you want to swap disks. or ANY time, for that matter. Gamespot has a responsibility to post reasonably nuetral articles, and what we have here is something that misleads the community who reads it (and for that matter, probably won't see the note at the bottom about how short the loading times from standby actually are) and is basically bashing the system, intentionally or not, with insignificant evidence. AS rbrtchng1 said below, we don't see articles about how easily DS styluses are lost, because it is in no way significant enough to write an article about, even though i'm sure everyone has to account for one lost stylus at some point just like "every gamer has to deal with the load times at some point" (paraphrased).
aramitz, the trouble is that they have presented the wrong numbers. nobody needs or wants to cold-start their PSP every time they swap games/disks, and so the data here is only making the PSP look bad.
once again, please ignore this article. for questionable reasons, Gamespot has chosen to use the cold-start times. This is the equivalent of turning off your PC, and then timing how long it takes for it to start back up fully and navigate to this page. Why the hell would you do that if you can just get here when the PC is on, or from the internet browser/desktop? Much the same is the PSP's sleep/standby function. when you can flick the power button to go to what's basically a screensaver/powersave mode and/or switch games while the console is on, you don't NEED to do a cold start every time you want to swap disks. or ANY time, for that matter. Gamespot has a responsibility to post reasonably nuetral articles, and what we have here is something that misleads the community who reads it (and for that matter, probably won't see the note at the bottom about how short the loading times from standby actually are) and is basically bashing the system, intentionally or not, with insignificant evidence. AS rbrtchng1 said below, we don't see articles about how easily DS styluses are lost, because it is in no way significant enough to write an article about, even though i'm sure everyone has to account for one lost stylus at some point just like "every gamer has to deal with the load times at some point" (paraphrased).
Honestly, this comes off like a full frontal PSP-bashing frenzy of an article. I'll readily admit i'm biased that way, maybe even enough to be called a PSP fanboy, but bear with me. Testing from startup so potential buyers know what the loadtimes are like is one thing; but to use this as some sort of proof the PSP is inferior outright is just not kosher. The author[s] of the feature obviously knew about the PSP's sleep system, as it was mentioned; however, they declined to test this faster and more commonly used method of powering down. Why? "every user will have to start the game from scratch at least once, if not many times, if they change games often." Wrongo. You can press the home button while the PSP is on, or if you feel too lazy for that, even pop out the current disk and replace it with a new one in the middle of a game/film/whatever, WHILE THE SYSTEM IS ON. Therefore, a full start up is really only necessary the first time you push the power button - when the system is just out of the box. There is no grounds for comparison to any other systems at all here. Presently what stands is almost like a comparison between one car's 0-60 and another's 0-120. A better article topic might have been how the amount of saved data on a memory stick affects load times; in my personal tests and the valid opinions of several friends of mine, the more data, the longer the load time. The Gamespot results might even be affected if you have more or less on your memory stick, along with what brand and read speed it is, as well as individual PSP's. There are too many variables in a study where the wrong variable was tested any way here, and it is an incredible dissapointment to see a fault such as this.
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