Sony Announces the NGP

As we mentioned yesterday, there was a good chance that Sony was going to be unveiling a new handheld at their press conference last night.  A lot of sites like ours rolled the dice and the great Gods of Rumor have smiled upon us with fervent satisfaction.  Behold! The Sony NGP!

That's codename NGP to you.  ("Next Generation Portable")

Sony is calling the NGP the sequel to the Playstation Portable and the first barrage in the "Next Gen" handheld market. Kotaku was at the press conference and has some of the steamy details.

But what does that mean? For starters, the new hardware features dual analog sticks; a 5-inch OLED display (960x544 resolution -- 4x the PSP's); 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS; front touchscreen and rear touchpad (woah!); and, for good measure, the same six-axis motion system that propels the Move, plus a three-axis compass -- oh, and we can't forget the front and rear cameras (those come standard these days). Of course, it plays games, too, which will be offered on new flash memory-based cards (so long UMD!).

Now THAT is crammed full of goodness. Rear touch pad? I would have never even thought of that as an addition, but it could add some really nice functionality to all that blank space back there. Not to mention actually have a use for your ring fingers and pinky. There be touch all in this bitch! I'm also really glad to see that they are moving to flash based memory cards and doing away with UMD altogether. Memory cards are cheap as hell these days and can hold a lot more information. I also like my handhelds to be as much solid state as possible. Less moving parts always mean less breakage in the long run.

Oh and for those hardware spec geeks out there:

CPU: ARM Cortex-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: 5 inches (16:9), 960 x 544, Approx. 16 million colors, OLED

Touchscreen: Multi-touch screen (capacitive type)

Rear touchpad: 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 and left sticks; Start button; Select button; volume buttons (+/-)

Wireless communications: Mobile network connectivity (3G); IEEE 802.11b/g/n (n = 1x1) (Wi-Fi) (Infrastructure mode/Ad-hoc mode); Bluetooth 2.1+EDR (A2DP/AVRCP/HSP)

So far the game lineup is looking pretty hot as well, with a lot of the major PS3 franchises making an appearance: Call of Duty, Broken, Gravity Daze, Hot Shots Golf, Hustle Kings, Killzone, LittleBigPlanet, Little Deviants, Reality Fighters, Resistance, Uncharted,  and WipEout will all be making an appearance on the new machine.

Take a look at Uncharted on the GDP:

My expectations for Sony's new handheld was pretty low, I will admit. But right now the tech in me is screaming out that I neeeeeed one even though you could call the PSPgo an abject failure.   Let's just hope they treat this thing a little better than they did that. I'm also interested to learn more about the update and sync system of this little fucker.

Update: Here is some video of the rear touch pad functionality. Indie game developers are going to jizz all over themselves when they get their sticky little mittens on this.

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