PlayStation Portable 2 (PSP2) Revealed

By Hector Cortez Jan 27, 2011, 6:56 GMT

Sony has unveiled its new PSP portable today, codenamed NGP, and it's packing quite a bit of technology under the hood.

Note: It's not officially named PSP2, but one would assume Sony will stick with its established, recognizable PlayStation Portable brand.

The screen is a 5-inch OLED display with a resolution of 960x544, it has two analog sticks, comes with 3G, WiFi and GPS support, sports both a front and rear camera, front and rear touchpads, an incredibly powerful CPU, and no more UMDs.

The new device will launch this holiday season, so expect a huge presence at this year's E3 2011 expo in June.

Every game title will be provided with a space called "LiveArea" where users will have access to the latest information of games provided from SCE and 3rd party developers and publishers through PlayStation Network. Additionally, users will be able to view an Activity log that is constantly updated with accomplishments from users who are playing the same game, which in turn can trigger active real-time communication among users.

The new system will include an application called "Near" that will let users find out what their friends in the vicinity are playing now or what they were playing recently. Users can meet their friends and new players virtually, regardless of what games they are playing, simply by sharing their game information.
 
NGP drops the UMD format and adopts a new, small flash memory based card that can store the full software titles plus add-on game content or the game save data directly on to the card. By adopting flash memory based card, SCE will be able to provide game cards with higher capacity in the future, allowing developers to store more game data.
 
NGP will also come equipped with three motion sensors, gyroscope, accelerometer and electronic compasss.
 
NGP is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 core CPU and a SGX543MP4+ GPU.
           
External, tentative dimensions are approximately 182.0 x 18.6 x 83.5mm (width x height x depth).