Sony announced PSP2 as the Next Generation Portable or NGP

Sony has recently announced the next version of PSP, called Next Generation Portable or NGP which they are claiming to be equally powerful as the PlayStation 3. There were a good number of rumors in the tech world and different media about the next generation of Sony’s handheld gaming device. Sony made their announcement of the NGP in a press conference which took place at Tokyo with its full specs and details with an estimated release time.

The NGP or PSP2 features connectivity options like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or 3G and guiding options like GPS or Digital Compass. NGP is going to be big on screen too with its 5-inch OLED display of 960 x 544 pixels. Sony has also considered the long demanded feature of the gamers, dual analog sticks in this portable version of PlayStation. There are more variations of inputs in this device which includes a capacitive touchpad at the rear of this device and a six-axis motion sensing system with three-axis gyroscope and three-axis accelerometer. It has both front camera and rear camera including a built in microphone. And it of course has built in stereo speakers.

The question that comes to many tech enthusiasts’ is that if it is going to be a gaming smartphone as it has 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity and built in microphone with both front and rear cameras. Sony representative denied NGP’s usability as a smartphone and he said that Sony does not want to see the consumers are talking over the NGP with the analog sticks to their head. He rather suggested the phone (the Xperia Play aka the PlayStation Phone) from Sony Ericsson which is at first a smartphone and then a gaming device though he predicted that  there will be hacks and people will try to use it as a smartphone.

The biggest surprise of the device is still untold. It’s the ARM Cortex A9 quad core processor which gives Sony the confidence to compare this device with the power of the big PlayStation 3. This confidence is also supported by the SGXMP4+ GPU giving you the same gaming experience of PS3 in your hand. The necessity of using such powerful chips in such small screen is being questioned by many tech analysts. We will have to wait and see what the game studios do to make use of this huge power in that screen. Till now we know titles like Call of Duty, Killzone and Uncharted are waiting to be released for this platform and that makes the market more challenging than ever.

Sony NGP has no innovative technology or idea which is going to make it a unique piece of technology like the Nintendo 3DS and all it boasts of is high end specs. There must be a big question about the price, but Sony assured that from the very beginning they were careful about the price of this device. So the price is going to be lower than the expectation with all the features and high specs. If they can keep it low, then that will be the selling factor of this device as there is nothing special found in the NGP till now.

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