Sony's Next Generation Portable Won't Be as Powerful as a PlayStation 3

The Next Generation Portable, Sony's new handheld console, won't be as powerful as its current home console, the PlayStation 3, despite older claims and rumors.

Sony presented the Next Generation Portable at the end of January, and the prototype device was met with universal acclaim due to its new features and impressive hardware specifications.

At that time, Sony was hyping it up, saying that it's as powerful as a PlayStation 3, rendering close to high definition graphics on its 5-inch OLED touchscreen.

Now, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, David Coombes, the platform research manager at Sony Computer Entertainment America, clarified a few things about the actual power of the Next Generation Portable.

According to the Sony executive, the NGP, in terms of pure power, is around halfway between the current PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation 3.

"Some people in the press have said 'Wow, this thing could be as powerful as a PS3.' Well, it's not going to run at 2 GHz because the battery would last five minutes... and it would probably set fire to your pants."

Still, expect the NGP to deliver impressive experiences due to its four symmetrical CPU cores, as opposed to the single core of the PSP, and its memory that's closer in size to the PS3 than the older PSP.

Even if it's not as powerful as a home console, the NGP has already impressed lots of third party developers, including Epic Games, which is adapting its Unreal Engine technology for it, as well as lots of internal Sony studios, who are bringing franchises like Uncharted or Killzone to the new handheld device.

Sony refrained from offering more details about when the Next Generation Portable is actually launched, so we still don't know when the Japanese company debuts what is already called the PSP 2.

Meanwhile, its biggest rival in terms of portable gaming, Nintendo, will debut the 3DS at the end of the month in Europe and North America, after already selling out in Japan.