some interesting points mixed with some obviously flame bait ones lol, still it's interesting

"

Because videogames journalism is embarrassingly bad.

1. Two quad-core processors boasting PS3-esque power in something the size of a PSP? Given that a PS3 is about 30 times the size of a PSP and still needs a fan you could get a medium-sized helicopter off the ground with (and which makes about the same amount of noise), how on Earth are they going to manage that without the thing melting in your hands after three minutes?

2. Come to that, if this thing's got as much power as the PS3, how come they haven't just shoved the same tech into an actual PS3(*) so that it won't deafen your pets any more?

3. We're told that the games will be sold online in the PS Store and in shops on special memory cards. But hang on. Once again, if we're talking games that are of PS3 standard in terms of visual quality and gameplay depth, we're going to be talking about several GB a pop.

The biggest SD card you can currently buy (outside of ultra-specialist, ultra-expensive suppliers) costs around £40 for 32GB, and that's still only probably going to be enough for what, eight or nine games? Buy any more and you're going to have to delete your existing ones, then re-download them (at several GB a time) if you want to play them again. Who wants that?

(Those are SD-card memory prices, of course. Sony have said that the memory-card format will be a brand-new proprietary one, and even now a 32GB Sony Memory Stick – a medium well over a decade old – comes in at more like £90 from the cheapest online stores.)

4. Shop-bought games will probably come on their own dedicated memory card. (So nice and small and easy to lose. Bonus for Sony!) But even 4GB SD cards are £6-7, which is a huge jump in cost of media compared to putting games on DVDs or Blu-Ray discs, and with a proprietary format it seems reasonable to bump that up considerably.

Now, obviously Sony won't be paying retail prices for cards, but the cost of manufacture for that much storage in a new format is still going to be very hefty. So given that the focus has so far been entirely on big console-type games with massive development budgets, how much is software going to cost if there's likely the best part of a tenner going just on the blank media? (And Sony are involved.) My blood runs cold just thinking about it.

5. Front touchscreen, rear touchpad, two analogue sticks, d-pad, eight gaming buttons – you KNOW some awful twatsack is already developing a game that uses ALL of those, don't you?

6. What's the point of having two cameras on a device with no phone functionality? (Okay, with 3G support it COULD use Skype and similar, but can you really picture yourself talking into something the size of a PSP? Remember how people mocked the much smaller N-Gage?)

And what sort of cameras are we talking here? Proper iPhone-style ones, or Fisher-Price DS ones? The absence of a flash seems to rule out any possibility of using them for any worthwhile sort of photography, and that's quite a bunch of extra cost and form-factor space to add to a device just so you can have your stupid grinning face on an avatar.

7. Hilariously, GI.biz have apparently already claimed that "the word on the street" is of a price in the range of £180-220. The 3DS costs more than that, and compared to the tech inside the NGP it's running on a wood-fired stove. Sony themselves were still trying to get £249 for the PSPGo last year, and have an unbroken 21st-century track record of gouging consumers on hardware price.

The company has claimed the unit will be "affordable", a term so subjective as to be meaningless, and has also said it wants to make a profit on hardware as well as software. (Uh-oh.) Their most telling comment so far, though, is that the price will be "appropriate for the handheld gaming space".

Let's remember – the "handheld gaming space" now includes the iPhone and the iPad, which fly off shelves at £500-600. And every other device you can buy in Currys today with a touchscreen the size of the NGP's calls itself a "tablet" and sits in broadly the same price bracket as the iPad. Hmm.

So since we're framing these things as questions, let's make it one:You don't REALLY think there's even the slimmest chance in the world of this thing coming out below £300, do you? (WoSblog's guessing £349 at a minimum, with standard games at £40 or even more.)

8. The NGP is the PSP only more so. Offhand I can't think of a single fundamental change between the new device and its predecessors, just a load of extras nailed on. It's bigger, more powerful, and still dedicated primarily to running home-console blockbuster-type games rather than ones designed for the mobile audience. Didn't the relative success of the DS against the PSP (against all predictions) teach Sony anything?

9. Does ANYONE know what's actually going on with the Android link-up? Will the NGP run Android games? Will Android machines run proprietary Android-based NGP games? (And if it's just PS1 games, how are Android devices like smartphones going to cope with emulating a machine with two analogue sticks, a d-pad and eight buttons?)

Is it both? Neither? Something different altogether? Nobody seems very clear. Are Sony going to let the Android Market, with its unfiltered bucketloads of free and super-cheap games, exist alongside the PS Store? Etc etc.

10. And don't Sony know that NGP stands for Neo Geo Pocket? Man, imagine the potential for hilarious misunderstandings and eBay scams.

Even notwithstanding that last one, this could get really messy.

(*) EDIT: Since the influx of educationally-subnormal children to this blog (thanks, N4G!), it seems I need to spell out that point 2 was intended as a facetious joke. Clearly you can't just put the NGP chipset into the PS3. The main reason for this is that it's absolutely plainly NOT as powerful as a PS3, despite what total idiots have been saying for the last few days.

I mean, seriously, that Uncharted demo footage people are wetting their trousers over? Really? It looks like a particularly boring jungle section from a mediocre PS2 Tomb Raider. Tsk.

"

http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2011/01/27/ngp-the-questions-nobodys-asking/

Now, that's not true and an obvious flamebait. Most of this article is, really.

Also, point nr. 8 is so stupid. A PSP with some extras? Yeah, I don't even want to waste internet space on that.

I find it mighty peculiar how there is not a "Nintendo 3DS: 10 questions nobody's asking" blog post or article.

Here is what I speculate:

1. Gaming media was shunned into silence about new Nintendo platforms when they wrongly predicted the PS3 to win this generation.

2. In the wake of the Wii's success, gaming media is not taking Nintendo to task like they did before the release of the Wii because they want to bottle all their vitriol for when Nintendo releases a platform that is not number 1 in it's generation.

3. Gaming media is fervently behind the 3DS due to the success of the DS and the glass-less 3D trick Nintendo is employing sating their vitriol.

4. Video game blogs disperse with the most hateful bile leaving the gaming media free to focus on other gaming matters.

5. Nintendo has bought influence with the success of the Wii, thusforth if the gaming media criticizes or takes a line even in their Op-Ed pieces, Nintendo will cut off all insider access for previews (I think almost every single major player in gaming does this and it is reflected in the reviews of AAA games).