Sony has finally confirmed details about its NGP at E3. It is really called the PS Vita and the handheld device will sell for $250 when it arrives next year. That’s for the Wi-Fi only version. The $300 3G PlayStation Vita will arrive in partnership with AT&T sometime in this year’s holiday season.

Specs include a 5-inch OLED touchscreen, front and rear touch pads, a quad-core processor and dual analog sticks. It’s also has a camera on both the front and back sides.

The recent rumors and leaks about the official name for Sony’s next portable, so far called the “Next Generation Portable” or NGP, are looking more legit today.

Some wording and details buried in the HTML source code for Sony’s official E3 website indicate that yes, the handheld will be officially called “PS Vita.” This corroborates what we have heard as well as marketing materials that were recently spotted.

The latest rumor is that Sony will name their upcoming NGP handheld the “PlayStation Vita.” Yeah, we think it’s weird too. Vita is the Latin term for “Life,” so let’s hope the battery life ends up surprising us. Backing up this rumor, the psvita.com domain features the same technical contact as psp.com.

Well, we should know for sure about this rumor at Sony’s E3 keynote on June 6th. The NGP is expected to sell for $250-$300 for the cheapest model. What do you think of this name?

Rumor is that in order to cut costs and compete with the price of Nintendo’s $249 3DS, Sony’s NGP handheld might be gimped from the start. The NGP was originally intended to ship with 512MB RAM, but will now only ship with 256MB. It has also reportedly lost the 16GB of internal memory first planned, and this might be replaced by external storage cards.

If this is true, it means that the NGP will be a slightly less capable machine and that would be a real shame. But this would allow it to compete with the 3DS.

Sony hasn’t offered any pricing yet on the upcoming NGP portable gaming console, but we do know that it won’t be cheap. There will be two versions, one with 3G and the other with WiFi only. A new survey is being circulated by a research firm called Toluna, which is sponsored by Ubisoft and was called Ubisoft – NGP concept – EU Adults.

The survey asked if buyers would buy the NGP portable and then listed prices for the 3G and for the WiFi only versions. We have no idea if the prices listed are accurate or not. According to the survey the 3G NGP would retail for $350 and the WiFi only would be $250.

Sony’s Jack Tretton said that the company intended to launch their Next Generation Portable in “at least one territory” by the end of 2011, and now we might have the answer as to which one. Reports indicate that the quad-core, OLED packing handheld may arrive in Europe first on November 11th.

If this is true, it would be a fitting date, 11/11/11. The anonymous sources say that “development deadlines have been set to ensure key Western releases are finished before the end of the summer for deployment in the autumn.” anyway, it gives all of us some time to save up our money.

Ever since Sony made the announcement about the Sony NGP everyone has been wondering how much it will cost. Sadly, we still don’t know. But we do know that Sony wanted to keep the NGP price as low as possible, and so they dropped a bunch of features from the Next Generation Portable before the final specifications were announced.

We don’t know what exactly was dropped, but the point is that it will be affordable. It doesn’t matter how many features a device has if it is out of reach of it’s market. The NGP will be priced competitively and not expensive when compared to other portable consoles.

Sony’s SCEA president Jack Tretton hinted in an interview that the NGP might ease some of the worries on battery life, but not on price. He said that the company would “certainly look to improve” the PSP’s battery life even with the five-inch screen and quad-core hardware. Engadget thinks that means more than the 4.5 to seven hours of typical use.

Regarding price, he hinted that the device might be a bit expensive. We are talking more powerful hardware and hopefully good content. He said, “I think if the quality’s there, then the people will find a way to buy it, within reason,”.

Sony’s Next Generation Portable (PSP2) has been called a PS3 for your pocket. It is codenamed the NGP. So how much does it cost? Sony has no answer to that yet, but GameStop has the device up for pre-order and they have a price in mind. The Sony NGP page on their website has an estimated price of $999.99.

They probably just want to make it look like it had a price cut the day it comes out. Sneaky. Sony hasn’t mentioned when they will be announcing the actual price, but with the device is scheduled for an end of year release.

Sony’s next PlayStation Portable is codenamed NGP and will be based on five key concepts: Revolutionary User Interface, Social Connectivity, Location-based Entertainment, Converging Real and Virtual (augmented) Reality. It will be compatible with the PlayStation Suite and is backwards-compatible with downloadable PSP games and content.

It has a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 5-inch touchscreen OLED display with 960 x 544 resolution, dual analog sticks, 3G, WiFi, GPS, a rear-mounted touchpad, accelerometer / gyroscope motion sensing, an electronic compass, and cameras on the front and back. Expect it to be available this holiday season.