Our valued forum member and notorious accessoire-collector Neotechni wrote a great piece about the PSP2 which deserves to be shared with the world! Read on and discuss!

Game distribution:
We know PSP2 will come with UMD in some form or another, be it a multi-layered (more than 2) UMD or Bluray-based UMD. Physical distribution is required for many reasons, and isn’t going away any time soon.

Given a layer of UMD is 1/5 the capacity of a DVD, a layer of BLUMD would have 5 GB, thus 10 GB on a dual layered one. BLUMD would also use less power and load faster. 10 GB seems like enough space, given PSP2 will be in between PS2/XBOX/Wii/GCN and PS3/360 in processing power, and XBOX/Wii/PS2 used about 9 GB. PSP2 will probably need as much.

Sony may make a model without UMD (and more built in memory) but I’d say given: http://www.joystiq.com/tag/japanesehardwaresales

Sony tried that already, the people voted with their wallets, and they don’t want a download only PSP. The odds of a DD-only version are pretty much Go’s sales divided by PSP’s sales, or aprox. 1.5%. Sales are what the people in charge look at.

Controls:
We can safely assume after all the flak PSP has taken for only having one analog stick, PSP2 will have 2. Considering how many competing handhelds have touchscreens and accelerometers, PSP2 will unfortunately. have them as well. PSP2 will probably also have a built in camera for the same reason. If we’re lucky, we’ll get analog buttons, L2/R2 and maybe L3/R3 as well. Getting as close to possible as SIXAXIS/DualShock3 would be the best thing Sony could do for the system. What held PSP back was the lack of controls versus PS2. (And GBA versus SNES)

Given DS has already done the touchscreen to death, and how iphone brought us multitouch, Sony will probably use multitouch to set it apart from the DS. It’d be awesome if Sony used one of those touchscreens that could raise/lower parts to make virtual buttons

Display:
PSP2 WILL have a higher resolution screen than the PSP1 (which had 480*272)
That much is certain. Given Sony’s focus on TV out and improving upon that with each major hardware revision (2x got TV out via progressive scan, 3x enabled it via interlaced, Go added the ability to use PS3 controllers) we can assume PSP2 will at the VERY LEAST enable fullscreen TV out via 480p. It would make the most sense that PSP2′s LCD would be the same resolution, 720*480 which is actually quite common for recent portables. This would make development easier, and guarantee no matter what the game would run the same on either display.

However, 480p is last gen technology. Sony is most likely going to want to continue their HDTV push and at the very least, make PSP2 720p compatible. Possibly via a scaler chip, which could also do 1080i (worst case scenario they display the 720p image centered in a 1080i frame like PSP does with it’s TV out).

Given Sony’s big 3DTV push on PS3, I think Sony will do the same on PSP. The reason 3DTVs need glasses is so people can sit in any position from the TV at any angle. 3DTVs without glasses usually require the viewers to sit in a specific spot. Given PSP2 will almost always be directly ahead of the user, Sony could use a 3D LCD without needing glasses. Some people (I know I did) bought PSP1 cause of the widescreen making it the closest to HDTV gaming they’d get in a while. Sony could bring this same effect to PSP2, and make it the huge “gimmick” to set it apart from it’s competitors

Hardware
Backwards compatibility is a must for multiple reasons.
-Go’s sales proved people want to be able to play their existing games. 60 million existing PSP owners is not something Sony wants to ignore. Given enhanced backwards compatibility (ie: upscaling via TV out, control mapping for unused buttons, in-game XMB, custom soundtracks, etc) this could entice a lot of people to upgrade
-PSP2 will be going up against multiple competitors with BC with their predecessors, specifically the DSi/iPad. And it’d be suicide to go up against them with say, a launch of 20 games when DSi/iPad has thousands.
-Sony has a lot of content on the PSN which they definitely want to keep selling. PS1 content can be done via a new version of the emulator, easily. But PSP is too powerful to emulate even on PSP2.

And given that last point, that tells us the hardware will be a faster version of the old hardware. Think like when Sony unlocked the CPU speed from 222 to 333. It’d be like that all over again. This would minimize the developer learning-curve, and they’d be starting PSP2 development already knowing how to make better games. It’d just be like another generation of PSP games instead of starting from scratch. Wii did the same thing, though not that well since it was an incremental leap. PSP2 will be a bigger leap. Lets face it, PSP already has 64 MB of RAM, even doubling that would be more than Wii has. PSP has 2 MB of VRAM, simply doubling that would give it as much as PS2 had, which could do 720p and 1080i.

I’d imagine Sony will be more than doubling PSP1′s specs. Even iPhone 3GS has 256 MB of RAM. It’s safe to assume PSP2 will have that. Especially since expecting 512 is more than PS3 has, and PSP2 won’t be superior to that (PS3 has 256 MB of system RAM shared with the GPU, and 256 MB of dedicated VRAM for the GPU) Processor wise, 666 MHz would merely double PSP1, I’d expect 999 minimum or 1.3 GHz tops.

Connectivity:
It’s a safe assumption Sony will be upgrading the Wifi and Bluetooth in PSP2.
They’ll also be enhancing how it interacts with PS3. Don’t ask me how, but we know it’s a priority. At the very least it will support rumble on controllers, and Playstation Move via bluetooth.

Unfortunately, Sony will probably use that crappy PSP Go docking connector, thus limiting it’s usefulness as a portable hard drive, and making it difficult/expensive to charge it and use TV out at the same time.

I would imagine, Sony would like to incorporate 3G (or 4G?) somehow, giving it internet access at all times. PSP Go already has bluetooth tethering to cell phones (if you ignore the fact that it doesn’t support the PAN profile iphones and other newer phones use) Sony may just stick with that. Given a lot of people won’t use it, or don’t want to pay for it (though iPad has fixed that a bit with the ability to buy blocks of 250 MB, PSP2 may be able to do that too) Sony may sell only certain models with 3G/4G (like the iPad does) or a hardware addon. Sony now has multiple competitors with a permanent internet connection (iphone/ipad, WinMo7, Android, Palm Pre) Sony doesn’t want to get left behind

Software:
Sony has told us many times they want to bring PSN to more devices. It’s a safe bet that includes PSP which already has it to some degree. That means trophy support, PSN buddy lists, voice/video chat, etc.

PSP2 will definitely have in-game XMB. This brings us custom soundtracks (PSP1 is already capable of it via hacking)

At the very least, Sony will need more features from PS3. Like sorting games into sub folders, meta data editing, etc.

If Sony REALLY wanted to ditch UMD (which they admitted yesterday that they don’t), they COULD distribute PSP2 games on DVDs, and have any PS2/PC/PS3 install them to PSP.

BUT a portable should be able to operate on it’s own and not require a PS2/PC/PS3.

And it would still need a ton of internal memory to not be annoying, and still require an online connection during the install to verify you’re not copying it to a 1000 of your friend’s PSP2s. Granted this wouldn’t require broadband for PCs or early model PS2s, but PS3 and later model PS3s don’t support dial up. And not everyone with dial up is on dial up cause they can’t afford broadband. They simply don’t have access to it. And this would still forbid countries without PSN stores from using it. (Poland for example has no access to the XBOX Live marketplace, and a bunch of arabs spammed the US Playstation boards complaining they have no PSN access)

If Sony wanted to not piss of retailers, they could even let you sell the disc, and just have whoever buys it buy a new key to sync it to their account (like what they are doing with SOCOM on PSP). Thus earning devs money off used games. The retailers wouldn’t be happy, but they wouldn’t be boycotting it either.

PSP2 would just need a LOT of built in space. PSP Go was obviously built for new users at the trailing end of a generation, 16 GB just isn’t enough for a whole generation of PSP1 games, let alone PSP2 games which will be much larger. Most people don’t want to deal with swapping, before Wii got the ability to run games off SD cards, many people who filled their Wii’s just stopped buying games. And PSP1 games are many times larger, let alone PSP2.

Another method to bring games to areas without broadband, attach multi-terabyte harddrives to in-store PS3 kiosks and install PSP2 games to it via USB harddrive, expose the USB ports, enable it to act as a Wifi/RemotePlay server (something they should have done already, but I digress), and allow people to buy games from the kiosk. They wouldn’t even be limited to one customer per kiosk if they’d enable USB mass media mode while in Remote Play, and have people browse the stores on their PSP2 (which will definitely have a larger screen than PSP). Using faster WiFi, it’d be about as fast as USB 2.0 though they’d have to hope their batteries are charged or plug it into a USB port. This wouldn’t detract from available retail space. Sony could sync the purchases with the distributor when they install games from their harddrive. And when they go to their PC, they’d resync with your PSN account. Though without broadband, they’d have to find a way to keep track of purchases without using the PSN account (ie: the hardware’s unique identifiers, like the WiFi MAC address) And since they aren’t going to add a money slot to it, people will just buy special (in that they only work on that one kiosk, otherwise they’d use it on multiple) PSN cards from the store they are in.

Though retailers wouldn’t be likely to support something they can’t make money off used sales, as the Go boycotts proved…