Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Sony Just Got Serious with Next Generation Portable


Sony has taken its sweet time coming up with the NGP (Next Generation Portable) follow-up to its venerable PlayStation Portable. The PSP's last refresh came in 2007 and mu8ch has changed since for mobile gamers.

Above all, smartphones have gobbled up the casual gaming market faster than you can say, "Angry Birds". Perhaps aware of this, arch-rival Nintendo has its 3DS ready to go-see p32-and the NGP won't be on shelves till the end of the year at the earliest. Too late?

That remains to be seen, but what's not in doubt is that the NGP is a serious piece of kit. It's powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, capable of clocking up unpredented handheld speeds of 1.5GHz. Up front there's a spanky, five-inch OLED touchscreen this allow you to touch, grab, push and pull objects across the NGP's screen.


SPECIFICATIONS:
PROCESSOR Quard-core ARM Cortex A9 up to 1.5 GHz
SCREEN 5-inch, 960x544, OLED touchscreen
CONTROLS Two analogue sticks, one joypad, three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer, three-axis electronic compass, four front buttons, two shoulder buttons, capacitive touchscreen, touch-sensitive panel or rear
CAMERAS Front and rear (spec not confirmed yet)
CONNECTIVITY 3G, N-Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS
SIZE/WEIGHT 182x84x18.6mm/weight unconfirmed

Add twin thumbsticks, cameras front and back, three motion sensors, a gyroscope, accelerometer, a compas and a plethora of buttons and you have even more controllability than the famously tactile experience Nintendo offers with the 3DS.

To accommodate all that, the NGP is more than seven inches wide-that's two inches bigger than the 3DS-and nearly an inch thick. To make that feel as unbulky as possible the chassis has what Sony dubs a "super oval design", making the NGP feel more confortable in your hands than its dimensions might suggest.

with all that power and control, the NGP is tooled up to play some of PlayStation's most technically demanding games, and Sony has aspirations of the new portable platform playing selected PS3 titles on the move.

Games will be supported by LiveArea, an interactive platform that allows to share with so much power the NGP is tooled up to play demanding playstation titles achievements with friends and the world in general. Even cooler is the pre-installed Near service, which allows users to find fellow NGP players nearby (see what did there), then communicate via 3G or Wi-Fi. And even cooler than that is the news that Sony's clunky UMD storage system, used and abused on the PSP, has been killed off. God riddance. The NGP will also have full access to PS Suite. The games library developed for Android phones.

The leitmotif of mobile gamling in the last few years has been greater simplicity. But NGP takes a very different tack. This is a serious, high-specced handheld console, designed for those who demand a lot more than hurling furious birds at pigs in glass houses. Let's hope such people still exist by the year's end.

1 Comment:

wih mantap neh belom pernah megang yang beginian..
kunjungan balik sob..thx y dah berkunjung ke blog ane

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