Sony NGP official photo gallery shows off hot new handheld

The Sony NGP is official. No longer the PSP 2, Sony's 'next generation portable' has been given an official airing at a press conference in Japan. We've covered the announcement already, but we figured you could probably do with a whole load of beautiful photos to keep you drooling. Bibs on? Let's go!

The Sony NGP packs a whopping 5-inch touchscreen, with a resolution of 960x544 pixels -- a vast improvement on the last PSP, but still not quite as high-res as the iPhone 4. It's also got a peculiar capacitive multi-touch pad around the back, which will give you a degree of extra control during gameplay.

There's 3G and Wi-Fi on board too, and front and rear-facing cameras too. It's not going to use the UMD format like older versions of the PSP, instead opting for a memory-card system to hold your games, although we don't know the specific format yet.

The big kicker is the NGP isn't going to be out until Christmas, and potentially even later than that in Europe. That's a very long time away -- by then we'll likely have a new iPhone, a new iPod touch and a barrelful of new Android devices to play with, and that's not to mention the Nintendo 3DS, which will be out in a couple of months.

For now at least, the hardware on offer here looks rather tasty. We're intrigued by that trackpad on the back and how it could alter gameplay, and we're psyched about that great big screen. This could make your games look really, really good.

What do you think? Let us know on the Facebook wall, or just below in the comments.