true. i think a big reason that nintendo lost out to the PSone and PS2 was because of the media they were using - ROM cartridges vs CDs. CDs much cheaper to produce, and could hold more information for less money. nintendo switched over too late.

the PSP's graphics will be far superior than the gameboy advance, as they claim it will be more powerful than a PSone... its also rumored that the sony PSP will use their new Universal Media Device (UMD) that can hold 1.8 GB... if this is true people might be drawn from nintendo yet again. the UMD might be costly to work with at first, but sony might just take a loss to promote the medium. the drawback in using something like a CD or UMD is that there will still be moving electronic parts inside that read the disc, spin it, eject it, etc. these parts will be more sensitive to movement, environment, and wear and tear. with a high density random-access type media, it'll be a lot harder to implement skip-protection, and this could cause a lot of problems on a portable unit. the reliability will undoubtably be worse than any gameboy - gameboy has no moving parts unless you count the clamshell configuration of the gameboy advance SP. you could probably take a gameboy to the beach and not worry about sand getting in or on it... take an MD player (for example) there, and there's a good chance it'll die - that happened to a friend of mine. i guess it also depends on how they market it. the MD is a great form of media, and is extremely popular in europe and japan. but it flopped in america because of shit poor marketting.. we can only wait and see. i would hate to see nintendo be reduced to software only.


i think you're right about the flip-down panel. looks like there's a little tab for you to flip the thing down with. and yeah, sony doesn't want to use normal flash chips... they just have to use their own proprietary device that no one else uses