Next Gen Portable PSP2

Sony computer entertainment Japan have officially announced the PSP2 Codenamed (NGP) The NGP or PSP2 is packing a serious punch for a handheld gaming device, 5inch OLED Touch screen display 960x566 with added rear touch panel, front and rear facing cameras, Six Axis motion sensors, GPS, Digital Compass, Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR), wireless N, 3G support for wireless Gaming and wireless media on the move, dual analog stick it will be shipping with the PS3 Collection of games, Such as Wipeout, Uncharted, and Little big
planet. But Sony haven’t confirmed the price or the battery life of the device but what they have shown off the game-play and graphics looks amazing. Date they will start shipping the NGP is the Holiday season this year, check out the mind blowing video below, and leave your comments in the section below.

Sony's next-gen PSP (NGP) has a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, quad-core GPU as well

from - http://www.engadget.com/

You know that crazy next-gen PSP (NGP) with multiple touchpads, dual analog sticks, and quadrupled resolution that Sony just trotted out? Yeah, it's got a quad-core Cortex-A9 and a quad-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU doing the grunt work within. We've never seen a handheld this powerful. Then again, considering the darn thing won't be launching until this holiday season, maybe quad-core parts will be the least Sony will need in order to match up to the "super phones" coming up this year. We're just wondering how long any of these souped-up portables will last on a charge. Full spec sheet after the break.

PSP2: Sony NGP hands-on and portable market analysis

With Sony's unveiling of the new NGP (Next Generation Portable) console, the battle for dominance in the handheld market is about to heat up. Tom Hoggins reports from Tokyo

With all eyes on the handheld video game market following the Nintendo’s announcement of the imminent UK release date for the 3DS last week, the onus was on Sony to make its move in the battle for portable supremacy.

With their Next Generation Portable (NGP) and PlayStation Suite – an initiative that supplies PlayStation branded games to certified Android devices – Sony have made a sweeping broadside to turn the tussle into an all-out war. The NGP will be going head-to-head with Nintendo’s 3DS, while PlayStation Suite will be looking to eat into Apple’s dominance in the smartphone gaming market. For all the talk of this being a Nintendo, Sony and Apple three-way battle, it’s easy to forget Google. The Californian search engine giant has gained a lot of traction recently as their Android devices become more popular, and this partnership with Sony will come as a huge boost. It will also be interesting to see how Microsoft respond with their Windows 7 phones as this particular competition reaches boiling point.

However, the news of the day was unquestionably the unveiling of the NGP. Despite the numerous leaks and rumours, the general air around Sony’s press conference was one of uncertainty. With the handheld market on a knife edge, and the 3DS impressing most that have experienced it, what Sony did with their new portable needed to win people over. And while most of us in attendance were trying to not get too excited just yet, it was an undoubtedly impressive start.

While a comparison between the 3DS and NGP is impossible at this stage, the question of what Sony would do to combat Nintendo’s glasses-free 3D revolution was answered fairly emphatically: with sheer technical grunt that produces visuals on a par with the PlayStation 3 and a lot of bullet point features. Let’s list them: 5-inch OLED screen, dual-analogue sticks, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, front and rear touchpads, front and rear cameras, motion control, ‘three-axis’ compass and GPS.

It’s certainly an exhaustive laundry list, but it could come across as a lot of technical bluster. However, the greatest success of Sony’s conference was making each feature seem integral to the machine. Whether this early promise for each feature will pan out remains to be seen, but watching Sony’s senior VP of product development, Shuhei Yoshida, ascending vines in Uncharted by brushing the rear touch pad in a climbing motion, aiming a sniper rifle by moving the machine and pinching and pulling the world in the delightful looking Little Deviants using both touchscreens in tandem certainly brought scores of impressed chortles across the conference room.

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• Even in the hands, the NGP’s oval shape is terrifically comfortable and ergonomic, and the screen is genuinely spectacular. The console’s dual analogue sticks –a long awaited addition to a portable gaming device– are very similar in feel to the PlayStation 3 controller and are perfectly placed. However, in the current build, the sticks and face buttons feel strangely small, miniaturised out of necessity to incorporate the bigger screen size. Take up any more space and you would have to make an already relatively bulky portable device even bigger. It is surprisingly light, however, estimably on par with the first PSP despite the extra features. According to Sony, it’s light because there is no disc drive, the NGP using yet another Sony proprietary format, the ‘NVG’ flash card. No whirring disc drive also saves on battery life, as does the OLED screen not requiring an extra backlight.

So the device itself is effortlessly impressive. But while Sony has insisted the pricing will be aimed at a sweet spot to entice consumers, the technical largesse will almost certainly come with a hefty price tag.
Which opens up the obvious question: do consumers still want to pay such a premium for handheld games? As with the PSP, Sony appears to be focusing on replicating home console games on their handheld device. As is now customary at these events, several third party publishers were wheeled out to pledge their allegiance to the product, but most of the games shown or announced were ports or sequels. Uncharted, Call of Duty, Monster Hunter, Metal Gear Solid. While the idea of playing these games on the move is certainly tantalising, would gamers on the go prefer to leave these games for the large TV and the sofa? Would they rather just stick with a quick fix game of Angry Birds while waiting for the bus?
As Sony’s Kazuo Hirai stated at the conference, the environment surrounding portable gaming has dramatically changed since the release of the PSP. Both Sony and Nintendo are attempting to adapt by offering premium features at a premium price. Will this tactic work? Time will tell. However, Sony’s shrewdest move could yet prove to be PlayStation Suite and their partnership with Google. As now, Sony has all bases covered. This already fascinating portable tussle has just become even more interesting
from -telegraph.co.uk

How Sony Can Make Their Next Gen Portable A Must Buy

Today, Sony is on the handheld gaming campaign trail, preparing for us to vote with our dollars this fall. Should you buy an NGP — the successor to the PSP — in late 2011?
It depends on whether Sony finally gets its PSP line right, if Sony's prose matches its poetry.

The Promise

This past week, we've seen the new PSP, the NGP, in action. We've seen the specs. We've even been able to imagine the invisible checklist of problems with the original PSP that Sony people must have had handy as they ticked them off and made the NGP:

__ Add Second Analog Stick
__ Get Rid Of Noisy Disc Drive
__ Add Touchscreen To Keep Up With Times
__ Make Sure It Is Smaller Than A Loaf of (French) Bread
__ Improve Wireless Connectivity
__ Add Cameras
__ Throw In At Least One Motion Sensor
__ Oh, And Make Sure It's More Powerful Than Whatever Weird Thing Nintendo Is Making
It's all so wonderful. They even added things we didn't know we needed, like a built-in compass and extra touch panels on the device's backside.

Sony's unveiling of their next big machine was as impressive as… their last one. Their last one happened in 2005, when they showed the world the PlayStation 3, a machine that had a boomerang-shaped controller, output graphics onto two HDTVs at the same time and ran, as those of us who attended the Electronics Entertainment Expo Sony briefing in May of that year saw, the best-looking video games we've still ever seen.

I still recall a reporter who was sitting next to me at the event, during that pre-Wii era when the Xbox 360 had just been impressively revealed. Sony's presentation was thunderous. The reporter later cackled: "Daddy's home." Sony's poetic pitch for the PS3 was wonderful. A year later, they dropped some features from the PS3, changed course in order to offer a more sensibly-shaped controller and finally, oh yeah, revealed the PS3's price: $500-$600. That was Sony's prose, unpleasant as some of it was to read.
Sony's last dream machine struggled for a while. Sony struggled to shave price, Sony struggled to not drop more features, Sony struggled to deliver video games in 2006, 2007 and even in 2008 that matched that 2005 promise. Only recently, has the PS3 proven to be the wonderful machine it had the potential to be, a $300-$400 box that runs the likes of Uncharted 2, Metal Gear Solid 4 and the increasingly stunning Killzone series.
We don't know the prose of Sony's new dream machine yet. We don't know when it's really coming out (already there is some hedging about whether it'll be out for all major markets in 2011). We don't know which games will be out on it. We don't know what it will cost, nor what its games will cost or even how we'll buy them.
We'll get those facts, maybe at E3 in June. PSP gamers ought to hope that Sony's 2011 version of 2005 isn't followed by a Sony recreation of 2006.

The Player's Needs

The NGP won't cost $1000. That's nonsense.

The NGP price will "make sense," or Sony executive Shuehei Yoshida told Kotaku, frightening some of our readers that they are being set up for harsh news.

We hope gamers will be spending under $400 for the NGP. We think Sony could have problems all over again if they can't get down to $300. Yes, their NGP feels like a machine plucked from the future. So did their PSP and so, strictly in terms of its display does the glasses-free 3D Nintendo 3DS.
If Sony has a checklist of PSP flaws and features, surely they also have this list of current prices for the things that will compete with the NGP for gamers' attention:
$130-$170 - DS
$170-$200 - PSP
$200 - Wii
$200-$400 - Xbox 360
$200-$300 iPhone 4 (plus the cost of a phone contract)
$250 - Nintendo 3DS
$300-$400 - PlayStation 3
$500-$700 - iPad with Wi-Fi
$630-$830 - iPad with Wi-Fi and 3G (plus the cost of a service plan)

Maybe the rate at which iPads had flown off store shelves would give Sony confidence to sell the NGP for a full $500, but it's hard to see a new portable gaming machine — even one that runs a beautiful version of Uncharted — costing more than any home console.

At $300, the NGP would still be a tough call for some people, considering the gaming alternatives. At $250, that's when things would get interesting and potentially tough for Nintendo (probably tough for Sony too considering all the expensive technology they're stuffing into the machine.)

Even if we knew the hardware price, we'd still not be able to judge the reality of the NGP without knowing its cost. Nintendo signaled early that its 3DS would be based on the old-school handheld gaming model. As soon as we knew it was running cartridge games, we could imagine people having to spend $30, $40, or $50 per game. On iPhone and iPad, games can be free, cost a buck or even go for as much as $10 for the very kinds of games that the typical Sony gaming crowd loves. (Like this one and this one.)