Sony announces NGP the PSP follow-up

Further to the news article a few days ago, in which the details of the PSP2 were still a bit sketchy; Sony have finally unveiled the hand-held, currently codenamed NGP.

Sony have been blitzing press releases with the words ‘Social connectivity’, which leads to the inevitable ‘this device will have both Wi-Fi and 3G network connectivity, together with various applications’. In essence it is going to be a PSP with applications – but hopefully not another App Store. This connectivity will allow many possibilities for users to connect, discover, share and play with friends, wherever they are.

The NGP will have three motion sensors, a gyroscope, an accelerometer and an electronic compass, which of course feature in the motion-sensing peripheral for PS3. It has a slight oval shape(not much different to the original it has to be said) with two cameras and it will sport two analog sticks. The screen itself has been upgraded however and is now a multi-touch 5 inch 960*544 OLED display which will allow you to interact with games in ‘Three dimension-like motion, through ‘touch, grab, trace, push and pull’ moves of the fingers.’

There will of course be community features which include the LiveArea, allowing users to share the gaming experience with others. It will also be able to connect to the PlayStation Network. This device will also include GPS and will be big on downloads with users being able to access the PlayStation Store with ease and purchase the latest titles. The built in storage is liable to be a flash memory based card.

The first picture of the NGP, courtesy of Engadget.

It must also be noted the CPU is going to be a QUAD-CORE! Maybe this sounds a bit standard though now and you were really expecting Six or Eight cores. I think however a ~1 GHz quad core will be able to do the job quite nicely.

More interestingly, ‘Sony has confirmed that NGP will also be able to access content that is available for Android based devices. Owners of Android portables will also be able to access content on the PlayStation Suite, including a host of PSOne titles. We’ll have more news about the PlayStation Suite shortly.‘ The precise details of this are not transparent but I think this sounds like a really good move forward.

The NGP is due to launch before the end of this year, but no price has been confirmed.

Specs. Note some of the connectivity section haven’t been finalised

CPU
ARM CortexTM-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
(Touch screen)
5 inches (16:9), 960 x 544, Approx. 16 million colors, OLED
Multi touch screen (capacitive type)

Rear touch pad
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 stick, Left stick
START button, SELECT button
Volume buttons (+/-)
Wireless communications

Mobile network connectivity (3G)
IEEE 802.11b/g/n (Wi-Fi) (Infrastructure mode/Ad-hoc mode)
Bluetooth® 2.1+EDR(?) A2DP/AVRCP/HSP(? )