Nintendo Announces Play-Yan Micro Media Player

Nintendo have announced via its Japanese website that the company plans to reissue its Play-Yan media player in the run up to the release of the new Game Boy Micro. Although functionally similar to the original device, which is able to play both MP3 and MPEG4 files from a SD memory card, the new Play-Yan Micro’s biggest change from the original hardware, besides size, is the removal of support for various micro games, which Japanese consumers have been able to download from Nintendo’s website. A widespread Western release for the device, which compares has never been confirmed by Nintendo, although Nintendo of Spain did announce plans earlier in the year to release two versions of the hardware – one which would play only MP3s, and a more expensive version with all the features of the Japanese version. Nothing has been heard of these plans since though, and it is entirely possible that the announcement of this new version will supercede them. Any further Western announcement on the Play-Yan, which replicates a lot of the Sony PSP's media playing capabilities on Nintendo's own handheld, is likely to be made in the run-up to the Game Boy Micro’s release worldwide this autumn. The Japanese version will debut on September 13th, and retails for 5,000 yen ($45) for the base model and 6,000 yen ($54) for a version with Nintendo's PC-compatible MediaStage encoding software - neither version comes with an SD memory card as default.