Well– it turns out everyone's speculation was right. Sony announced it's PSP successor today, named the NGP. Again, they are making a big deal of their interface, called LiveArea, and again, nobody will likely care. Developers are creating games that sound good: Uncharted, Killzone, Little Big Planet, and follow-ups of other blockbusters. Unlike the current PSP, there is a touch screen as well as buttons and two sticks. New features include a rear touchpad, GPS, a 5" OLED display featuring 4x the resolution of the PSP, front and rear cameras (why?), GPS, and an electronic compass.
Rather than the PSP's stupid disc based system, the NGP has flash memory based games. This is cool, except nobody wants to have a physical game anymore with the necessity of game storage on the go. Also featured is 3G data and WiFi.
At least the device should be fast. It features a 4-core Arm Cortex A9 processor, a fast GPU (SGX543MP4+ if you actually care or know what that means), a 960×544 pixel display, multitouch pads, the famous and often used (not) six-axis system, and bluetooth.
While nobody knows how the device will sell or perform, it seems that with this hardware, it will be expensive. And nobody wants to pay a lot of money for a system that can't last more than a few hours with low quality games and a terrible user experience. Unless Sony made some serious changes with the NGP, it will surely be another system that nobody cares about.
