The gaming industry is quite fond of rumors and speculations and, although sometimes these assumptions actually come true – and, even more, force companies to confirm things they wanted to keep a secret for longer – usually, most of them are exactly that, pure speculation, with no concrete evidence to back them up.

Recently, a company that produces graphics chips has unveiled that it has signed a contract with a major console manufacturer about implementing its products into a new handheld console. This led to a lot of rumors flying around, with some people suggesting that Sony was already hard at work developing a successor to its PlayStation Portable console.

The Japanese company decided to talk about these rumors and, through the voice of David Reeves, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, completely dismissed them. Reeves went on to say that, because of his position, he traveled to Japan quite a lot and he didn't see any plans for a new PSP handheld console. He then referred to the fact that the PSP 3000 was at the moment the main focus of Sony's engineers, who were working on improving its performances and firmware.

“No, there are currently no plans for a PSP2. I go to Tokyo quite a lot and no one has referred to it – I think they have their hands full at the moment. We just launched the PSP-3000 so we are still focused on this generation of the platform. The PSP is as successful in numbers as PS2 – it tracks its numbers in a cumulative basis. Its weakness, however, is its software. And that’s because developers, when it comes to placing their bets, have to choose PS3 and 360, then Wii, then DS, maybe even PS2 before PSP.”

Some pretty interesting statements from the Sony executive, who also compared the constant improvement of the PSP to what Nintendo was doing with its DS handheld, which became the DS Lite and is now the DSi. All in all, it does seem that the Japanese company is still focused on this generation of consoles and that no future plans are sketched out yet.

Let's just hope that Sony will continue to offer the same great support for the PSP as it has so far, and that users will continue to enjoy this console anywhere they want.