Early this morning during Sony’s media event in Tokyo, Sony took the wraps off of both the Next Generation Playstation (NGP) handheld and Sony’s attack towards Apple in the surging mobile gaming space in the Playstation Suite.
PlayStation Suite is the result of a new cooperative partnership between Sony and Google along with Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Ericsson to deliver Sony’s Playstation gaming platform to Android via custom emulator.
The Playstation Suite will also herald the debut of the Playstation Certified certification – a set of standards mutually agreed upon by both Sony and Google as the minimum required in order to run Playstation Suite on an Android smartphone or tablet across devices and manufacturers running Android Gingerbread.
The emulator will emulate some of the most popular games from the first Playstation console, with virtual controls supported also in the familiar Playstation control scheme for those devices without hardware controls. The Playstation Suite will make its debut in Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play Android smartphone later this year, which will feature dedicated gaming controls as well as the forthcoming Sony NGP handheld.
The NGP handheld, while colloquially called the PSP2 across the internet resembles a scaled-down PS3 in terms of power, with a 5 inch 960×544 resolution widescreen OLED capacitive display with 3G, GPS, Wi-Fi N and Bluetooth radios on top of front/rear cameras and dedicated memory card slot for Sony’s new NGP memory cards for NGP games along with the long desired dual analog sticks.
The gaming device is underpinned by a quad core ARM Cortex A9 processor tied to a PowerVR SGX GPU capable of rendering near PS3 level detail. The NGP handheld is slated to be released this holiday season, with pricing and carrier partners for 3G access to be determined.
