The Panasonic Jungle, a new gaming device, has popped up out of nowhere to battle the PSP Go and Nintendo 3DS. Panasonic’s first gaming console since the late-lamented 3DO (remember that?) is pitched at MMO fans. But with looks that resemble the open-source Pandora but without its openness, can the Panasonic Jungle take on bigger beasts like the PSP Go, Nintendo 3DS and the new iPod touch?
There aren’t oodles of details of details on the Panasonic Jungle yet. All we’ve really got to go on is some nuggets of information from Panasonic, the render above and some details we’ve discerned from dissecting it. The Panasonic Jungle has a clamshell design like the Nintendo 3DS but also packs in a touchpad, keyboard and what looks like dual D-pads.
Other features of the Panasonic Jungle we’ve spotted appear to be a 3.5mm headphone jack, a micro-USB connector and a mini-HdMI port. It looks like there might be an SD card slot too but we can’t really be sure.
The focus of the Panasonic Jungle will be online gaming and the cloud. Panasonic has talked much about what games we can expect. The one confirmed title is the Battlestar Galactica Online. We can’t help but wonder whether Panasonic will be reaching out to Zynga to get Farmville on its handheld or Blizzard for a tasty World of Warcraft tie-in.
The Panasonic Jungle looks pretty hefty and with the new iPod touch tapping into a huge library of apps, Sony toying with a PSP Phone and the Nintendo 3DS innovating with 3D, can it compete? Hit the comments and let us know what you think? Can the Panasonic Jungle make a dent?
Out TBC | £TBC | Panasonic (via Crunchgear)
