Skype only for PSP Slim & Lite because of Phat’s memory limitation

It’s a sad day for PSP Phat owners. Sony‘s just pulled the drain plug for all those still reveling in the tub of dreams for Skype on the PSP-1000, otherwise known as the Phat, and claimed that efforts to integrate Skype to the original PlayStation Portable model have been abandoned. The consumer electronics industry giant says that the PSP Slim & Lite is the only target platform for PSP Skype because of its larger memory banks. Check out the full article for more details.

We know some of you techies and geeks out there guessed this, but official confirmation just rolled in. Sony‘s rolling out the red carpet for Skype toward the PSP-2000, a.k.a. the PSP Slim & Lite (or Diet), only because the Slim can handle Skype’s memory requirements and the PSP-1000 (PSP Phat) cannot. Sony’s Nick Sharples stated:

Although PSP-1000 and PSP-2000 are identical in basic functions, there are differences in hardware specifications to some extent and, for that reason, PSP-2000 may differ in features from PSP-1000. We had studied the possibility of supporting Skype with PSP-1000 but had to give it up because of the smaller size of main memory on PSP-1000 series.

The real difference here isn’t so much as with weight as it is with memory. In fact, the PSP Slim & Lite packs double the RAM in megabytes (or mebibytes for the crusading computer geek) than the PSP Phat. And for the developers, 64 MB of RAM is probably much easier to work with for porting a voice communication software for use over WiFi than 32 MB of RAM. More on this as they come in.