Well I paid $600 for an ipad and i maight pay $500 for a psp2. Im kind of glad sony is doing this. It wont be that traditional upgrade- you know the usual launching with a $250 price, minimal upgrades, and what not. Sure those types of handheld will sell a ton but they won't blow our minds away. PSP2 sounds like its going to be  a powerhouse and i cant ait to see what it looks like. The reason I paid for ps3 was because I blown away with all the features it had at the time. Hopeffully im blown away with the psp2.

How much this baby will cost? How much it will cost to develop for it? I am not excited by this. I sold my PSP and DS and I'm using an iPad in my travels. I lost quite a lot in terms of gaming but I gained far more in terms of connectivity and book reading. If Sony wanna get consumers like me that are willing to pay a lot for a gadget they have to lure me with something more than pretty graphics.

Also, I hope they will place two analogic controls in such way that it is comfortable to the user.

 I think people don't realise that 'as powerful as the PS3' doesn't mean it's as powerful - just that it's the equivalent type of power for a screen of the PSP's size. It's not literally got a cell processor and capable of running Uncharted 2's PS3 code (Albeit it could theoretically be ported). The PSP is actually, by the same argument, more powerful then the PS2 and as powerful as the Wii - but it's not really, just in a pixel to pixel comparison.

 I think Sony are making a wise move here for the most part - while handhelds arn't typically all about graphics and amazing 'hardcore' games normally seen on consoles, with iPhone and similiar products giving people more then enough tetris type games it needs to differentiate itself. They'll have their own app store and suchlike too, for me it's pricing that will decide whether im interested - namely the price of games moreso then the console.

 The media bit is interesting too, I sort of wonder whether it'd be possible for retail games to be sold on some form of cheap flash card / usb stick and then installed to the PSP2's flash drive (Which I assume it'll have?). That'd be brilliant imo and give me the best of both worlds - retail purchases but no games to carry around.

 I'm very interested at the moment, but there are too many ifs and buts - I need to see all the 'other stuff', online funcationality, media capabilities, PS3 link up etc.

EDIT: Forgot to say but I also wonder whether Sony are going to try and make PS3 to PSP2 porting cheap and easy. There's no limitations for doing such - like there was with PSP's 1 analogue stick - and it'll get alot more games on the system if an developer can do it at little expense.

That depends on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the architecture chosen. If Sony chose well and if it turns out Nintendo chose relatively poorly on both counts then it is possible for a similarly priced PSP2 to exceed the performance of the 3DS in like for like 2D applications by a considerable degree. Of course at this point price, performance and battery life are mere points of speculation at this point.

We have had reports of PSP2 development kits running extremely hot. However it is likely that early samples would run at a much higher voltage than the regular unit due to yields and it is also possible for it to be using the 28nm process node at release given how aggressive Nvidia (presumption of their chipset choice due to rumours) transitions to new nodes and their familiarity with both TSMC and now GloFo foundries. This isn't a reflection on cost as new process nodes are expensive, it is a reflection on battery life. Since there are smart phones using the new architecture from Nvidia it is possible that a larger form factor PSP2 especially one which uses adaptive brightness control could achieve a reasonable battery life on a larger form factor.

It depends on what they are talking about. The PS3 is an inefficient architecture in terms of power / performance and performance / area compared to many architectures out there today. Depending on the resolution of the screen, they could have been talking about per pixel effects and theres always the large memory pool and flash architecture which could be 256-1024MB to give them the opportunity to add a lot of cheap high resolution textures through high speed low latency just in time delivery and the ability to hold a lot of them in memory.

People already got a 2nd job for the ps3... they need to get a 3rd one to get this baby xD

I know this is just a rumour, but I do belive it is true.

Sony's marketing KNOWS that they can't have similar specs to 3DS, because that would make it too similar to PSP, and people would not see the point of upgrading. So they are practically forced to make another powerhouse handheld, while people will see the 3D screen and PSP-like graphics as an impressive improvement from the regular DS.

Nintendo's got Sony exactly where they want them. Jugding from the third party games, that would be typical launch titles for a Playstation appearing on 3DS, I think third parties know this too.

I don't see what Sony can possibly do with another powerhouse handheld like the PSP. The successor won't be made by an 'unbeatable' console company, and it's competitor is not considered the underdog anymore.

EDIT: I'll also add, that moving upmarket is the textbook incumbent behavior in disruption litterature.

its controls better be as powerfull

it needs 2 analogs and 4 shoulder buttons 2 on each side

and maybe some kinda motion implementation like the sixaxis DS3 or even touch screen

They could be moving down market.

See: xxxx millions of Apple iOS products.

See: xxx millions of DS products.

Which has more x?

Obviously the wider the market the more downmarket you're going and you can achieve that by adding more performance so long as that performance is relevent to the wider market. So really now the question of how downmarket the PSP2 has gone is in relation to how good the software is and how good the user experience is in doing non-gaming applications. Sometimes it is the core who accept lower performance whilst the wider market waits for the solutions to become practical.

Gaming is in the software business.

In order for Sony to move downmarket, they must compete against Nintendogs, Brain Training etc. Or else, no non-gaming functions in the world will save them.

Of course, they could be releasing such software on the PSP2, and it would be a downmarket move, but that would make the high-end specs a waste if they don't focus on stuff that take advantage of it.

Either way, they are in a bad position. I think the PS3 and 360 and PSP have already proven that the downmarket is all about software and not non-gaming functions.