Recently, players on foreign forums have reported that their newly purchased consoles are unable to function properly. Thus, the moderator of our forum contacted a friend to obtain a new machine for experimentation; the system version was 3.72. The test results confirmed the claims of foreign netizens: an error occurred while attempting to flash the battery using this machine. The error code 0x00234000 indicates that the hardware does not support this feature. It seems Sony, in order to prevent increasingly rampant hacking, has started to use hardware means on newer PSPs to prohibit writing information to the battery.
It is important to note that, at this stage, Sony's restrictions only prevent the creation of Pandora batteries with the new mechanism. There is no shielding against downgrading the battery, meaning that the latest version (3.80 system) can still be used with the magic battery combination for jailbreaking operations.
Note: The battery used in the experiment had been normally flashed with an older version of the Pandora battery and had previously functioned without issue.