This Thursday, the 27th of January, Sony is holding a "business overview and strategy meeting" and select members of the press are invited. As far as I know, that much is fact. Everything else in this post is 100% rumor and conjecture.
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The tech and gaming blogosphere seems very certain that Sony will be announcing the Playstation Portable 2 at that meeting. To me it still seems an odd venue to announce a product, but then Sony has had such a bad track record of keeping secrets for big trade shows (remember Jack Tretton making a joke about the widely leaked "surprise" PSP Go reveal at Sony's E3 2009 press conference?) that perhaps they've thrown in the towel and opted for a smaller, more intimate reveal. We've heard a lot of rumors about the PSP2: that it has a touchpad on the back of the unit, that it'd be as powerful as a PS3 (!), that it'll have a touch screen (it seems unlikely that it'll have both a touch screen and a touch pad) and that it'll have two analog sticks (please let this one be true). Earlier this week Japanese gaming site Nikkei.com added to the rumors. Andriasang has translated the article for those of us who don't read Japanese. Nikkei claims that the PSP2 will be 3G enabled, but not capable of making phone calls (though one wonders about Skype support). In Japan 3G will be handled by NTT DoCoMo but of course no details for service in other parts of the world are known. Let me get my oar in early and say I really hope there'll be (presumably less expensive) WiFi only models here in North America. The last thing I need is a data contract for my handheld gaming system. (According to Nikkei) the PSP2 will also feature a "larger than normal" (whatever that means) OLED touchscreen, and a new processor to drive all those lovely pixels. So yeah, details are still pretty sketchy. Maybe we'll know more when we wake up on Thursday morning. Or maybe that meeting is about something else entirely. Meanwhile, the Playstation Phone is still expected to be revealed at the Mobile World Congress, which runs Feb. 14-17th, 2011.
Peter Smith writes about personal technology for ITworld. Follow him on Twitter @pasmith.
