Rumour: PSP 2.0 to be announced at E3?

If we'd written a news story every time a PSP re-design was rumoured, we'd have no time for playing any of our favourite PSP games.

That said, we think there probably is something going on at Sony regarding PSP right now. As we reported from GDC last week, Sony's snubbing of PSP at its big PlayStation Home announcement seems a shocking omission – hardly an oversight, more an indication that there is some sort of question mark hanging the over PSP within at Sony.

Now the hardcore games weblog Kotaku is reporting 'senior and third-party sources' as confirming PSP2 is on the way. Normally, we'd be suspicious of completely off-record briefings like this, especially from a lovably gossipy site like Kotaku – but it did have a high-profile run-in with Sony pre-GDC, which may well have stirred up some new sources and leaks.

Anyway, the scant rumours are that PSP 2 will be announced at this year's E3 expo in California in May, with the new machine arrive at the end of this year. The mooted improvements:

• The screen is gorgeous
• The loads are faster
• Improved buttons
• Internal flash — 8GB
• Possible touch-screen
• Possible built-in camera
• Uses UMD

Plenty of that makes sense (though we'd doubt the touch-screen), but we'd like to see more evidence before we get carried away.

It would be unusual for a console to be superseded without going through several more rounds of pricecuts – and as we noted after Sony's most recent financial report (which we did interpret as possibly suggesting PSP 2.0 was on the way) there seem to be plenty of PSPs in stock to be cleared.

Interestingly, Amazon has at least slashed the price of pink PSPs, presumably to clear them out (you can currently pick one up for £99, as we mentioned last week), while the base unit is now going for £135.

What do you think, readers? Do all the PSP rumours currently floating around actually add up to a new machine in the works?