If you like your portable gaming with a Sony flavor, then good news: the company has officially revealed the follow-up to the PlayStation Portable. The Sony NGP (Next Generation Portable) will launch this holiday season for an as-yet-unconfirmed price.
It may just look like a sleeker PSP, but this is a serious piece of kit. There’s a stunning 5-inch OLED screen (with a 960 x 544 resolution – four times as great as the PSP’s), twin analogue sticks, a front touchscreen and rear touchpad (err …), 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a 4 to 5 hour battery life (thanks, Eurogamer ), and a bunch more stuff that I’ve pasted below.
Oh yeah, and it has games . Sony is getting rid of the UMD format that it introduced for PSP, and will instead offer software on new flash memory-based cards. The games shown so far, including Uncharted: Portable and new iterations of Killzone , Wipeout , Resistance , LittleBigPlanet and Call of Duty , are visually on a par with most PlayStation 3 titles.
No price yet, but it should be fascinating to see how the NGP does against the Nintendo 3DS and increasingly strong iPhone . Some say the NGP is doomed , but I wouldn’t count this out so fast. Scroll down for the full hardware specifications and a video of the big reveal in Japan.
“Next Generation Portable Entertainment System” Hardware Specs
CPU : ARM Cortex-A9 core (4 core) GPU : SGX543MP4+ External Dimensions : Approx. 182.0 x 18.6 x 83.5mm (width x height x depth) (tentative, excludes largest projection) Screen : 5 inches (16:9), 960 x 544, Approx. 16 million colors, OLED Touchscreen : Multi-touch screen (capacitive type) Rear touchpad : Multi-touch pad (capacitive type) Cameras : Front camera; rear camera Sound : Built-in stereo speakers; built-in microphone Sensors : Six-axis motion sensing system (three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer); three-axis electronic compass Location : Built-in GPS; Wi-Fi location service support Keys/Switches : PS button; power button; directional buttons (Up/Down/Right/Left); action buttons (Triangle, Circle, Cross, Square); shoulder buttons (Right/Left); right and left sticks; Start button; Select button; volume buttons (+/-) Wireless communications : Mobile network connectivity (3G); IEEE 802.11b/g/n (n = 1×1) (Wi-Fi) (Infrastructure mode/Ad-hoc mode); Bluetooth 2.1+EDR (A2DP/AVRCP/HSP)
