Sony's Dev Studio President Talks NGP

The UK PlayStation site has an interview with Shuhei Yoshida, head of Sony's worldwide developer studios. In it, he explains that the handheld has been under development since 2008, going with a back-to-basics approach to get the "right" console built that developers would want to code for.

He is also looking to the small, indie developers to create great games for the PlayStation Suite (that will run on both NGP and Android phones) - these he says will innovate and use the NGP's features in ways that no one has imagined and, presumably, produce hits like Angry Birds that will drive grass roots interest.

He also mentions non-game development, suggesting that NGP will play home to a host of practical apps too, which might not be of interest to everyone, but will be another feature that the NGP can tick on the back of the box - A point about this from a different field, plasma screen TVs only need to run at 60Hz but makers were forced to upgrade them to 120Hz and 240Hz so that buyers would see they were an equal technology to LCD TVs which need to run faster, even though plasmas don't need the feature at all.

Expect a lot of this in future consoles, even though they don't need stuff - they will have them thrown into the box, just because the maker's feel the need to compete with other devices, which is likely why NGP has a 3G option.