Sony officially announced the PSP2 last night at their Tokyo conference. Whilst the PSP2 name wasn’t officially unveiled, they have slapped a codename of “Next Generations Portable” on it and unveiled its impressive specs. The new handheld will have a multi-touch 16:9 960×544 5-inch OLED screen (4x the resolution of PSP), a multi-touch pad on the rear of the device, dual analog sticks, microphone, two cameras (front and rear), three motion sensors (gyroscope, accelerometer and electronic compass), Bluetooth, as well as GPS, Wi-Fi and 3G (in a separate SKU) for network connectivity.

What’s more, games will be released on small, dedicated flash memory-based cards as well as on the PlayStation Store, with users being able to choose how to get their games. The device will be able to access the PlayStation Network, with “LiveArea”, “Near” and “Activity” log features (to check on what friends and Sony are up to) as well as Trophy support. You will be able to do all that and fight against people all over the world anywhere too thanks to the 3G support. Moreover, the device will be able to play PSP games, minis, PS1 classics, videos and comics from the PlayStation Store.

The NGP has an ARM Cortex A9 core (4 core) processor and a SGX543MP4+ GPU, with many saying it is comparable in power to the PS3. We would say it’s roughly half/three quarters of the power in theory, but you probably won’t tell in-game. Talking about games, Sony has confirmed a number of titles for it: Killzone, Uncharted, WipEout, LittleBigPlanet, Resistance, Little Deviants, Hot Shots Golf, Reality Fighters, Gravity Daze, Smart As, Broken, Hustle Kings and Call of Duty. We’ll be rolling out some videos in due course showing it off.

Here’s a size comparison with other handhelds: