The next portable PlayStation will feature an OLED screen and two touch panels – and ditch the Universal Media Disc, Sony said Thursday.
Sony took the veil off of its long-rumored successor to the PSP at a Thursday morning press conference in Tokyo. Codenamed "Next Generation Portable," or NGP, the unit at first glance looks very much like the original PSP, but with a more-rounded form factor and two analog joysticks. It will run on a four-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU.
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With NGP, Sony has created what looks to be the most-powerful portable game machine ever attempted. Games the company showed at the event looked very much like – and in some cases were ported versions of – PlayStation 3 titles. Although the NGP doesn't sport a glasses-free 3-D display like Nintendo's 3DS, the NGP seems like it will pack a serious punch inside.
Sony said it would release Next Generation Portable during the 2011 holiday season, but did not say how much it would cost.
The NGP's 5-inch OLED screen has touch capability, and the handheld also boasts a touch panel on the rear of the device. A game demo Sony showed had a player pushing objects "into" the screen by tapping on the front, and pushing them "out" of the screen by using the rear panel.
James Mielke, a producer at Tokyo game design studio Q Entertainment, gushed about the new device on Twitter following the announcement.
"I've seen the NGP up-close, and the screen is the most beautiful gear I've ever seen in my hand," he tweeted. "It punches the iPhone 4 screen in the junk."
Sony has not had much luck in the portable-game business. Although it has sold more than 60 million PSPs since 2004, that number is dwarfed by Nintendo's sales of more than 135 million DS units. Add to that, companies like Apple encroaching on the handheld gaming business with smartphones, and Sony is occupying an ever-smaller place in the market. With NGP, the company is once again looking for powerful graphics to save the day.
NGP will feature 3G and Wi-Fi capabilities, Sony said. It will have cameras on the front and rear, plus an accelerometer and gyroscope for motion control.
Jettisoning the PSP's Universal Media Disc format (and its associated clunky moving parts), NGP will utilize cartridges similar to those used by Nintendo DS. Sony said its use of flash media will give the device a "solid" battery life, which the website Eurogamer reports will be between 4 and 5 hours.
Games announced by Sony at the event include versions of hits like Uncharted and Hot Shots Golf.
Third-party software publishers showed ports of their PlayStation 3 games to the NGP, including Sega's Yakuza: Of the End, Capcom's Lost Planet 2 and Konami's Metal Gear Solid 4.
Western developers also appeared at the Tokyo event. Activision promised a version of Call of Duty, and Epic Games showed an Unreal Engine demo. In all, more than 80 publishers and developers are already signed on to produce NGP games.
Sony also unveiled PlayStation Suite, a platform-agnostic game-development environment that will run on Android phones in addition to NGP. Sony showed ports of its early PlayStation One games running on PlayStation Suite.
NGP users will be able to log into LiveArea, a service that will deliver new information about Sony's games. An "activity log" will update constantly with information about how other players are doing in the game you're currently playing.
A program called Near will show you what other NGP users in your immediate area are playing, then allow you to add those people as online friends.
Quick reactions: Between the OLED screen, two touch panels and crazy PlayStation 3-level graphics, expect NGP to cost a whole bunch of money.
I'd hoped for Sony to talk a little bit more about its digital-distribution strategy, but odds are that's a subject for another day.
For now, it's interesting to see that disc-based portable gaming is well and truly dead. PSP using cartridges is quite an amusing turn of events, considering it was Sony's pushing of the CD format that allowed the company to destroy the cartridge-based Nintendo 64 back in the day.
I'm definitely interested to see how the back-and-front touchscreens impact game design. Being able to "pinch" the unit as shown in the images seems like it would lend itself to some very different sorts of games.
Impressive as NGP is, Sony really needs to give consumers more reasons why they should own a games-only handheld. "Amazing graphics" has never been enough of a reason, but maybe there's more up Sony's sleeve this time.
Images courtesy Sony
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