Betcha didn't think this day would come, but it finally has. Sony has just come clean with its next-generation PlayStation Portable.
It's actually codenamed NGP and will revolve around five key concepts:
Revolutionary User Interface, Social Connectivity, Location-based
Entertainment, Converging Real and Virtual (augmented) Reality. It will
be compatible with the PlayStation Suite and is backwards-compatible with downloadable PSP games and content from Sony's PlayStation Store.
Specs include a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9
processor, 5-inch touchscreen OLED display with 960 x 544 resolution,
dual analog sticks (not nubs as on the current generation), 3G, WiFi,
GPS, a rear-mounted touchpad, the same accelerometer / gyroscope motion
sensing as in the PlayStation Move, an electronic compass, and cameras on both the front and back. Available this holiday season. Wait... what?!Games
will come on "new media," not UMD anymore, but we're unclear on what
sort of flash memory is being used. Sony's rather proud of the fact it's
offering the world's first dual analog stick combo on a portable
device, though we're more geeked about the quadrupling of pixel count
from the original PSP.
Sony's live event has been graced by demos of some pretty popular games, including Killzone, Resistance, Little Big Planet, and Uncharted
-- with the latter serving as a demo platform to show off how the NGP's
rear touchpad can be used to more intuitively climb up some vines. That
touch panel on the back is the same size and positioned directly under
the front OLED touchscreen, which allows for some pretty sophisticated
controls when using the two simultaneously.
The new console's UI will be called LiveArea, which has a bunch of
vertically navigable home screens and built-in social networking through
PlayStation Network. You can jump between games and the LiveArea
without losing your progress and comment on your buddies' great feats of
mobile gaming.
