Welcome to the Jungle baby! As we hinted at earlier today, Panasonic has just revealed that they are hard at work on a portable gaming system of their own. Its name is the Jungle, and it is a slightly different style of portable online gaming platform.

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I wish the trailer showed more of the actual system instead of the mascot, but it looks like it has failure written all over it. If that thing uses touchpads instead of real analog nubs and buttons, I would never consider getting it.

And unless they're willing to sign some huge checks, this thing is going to have the same problem other would-be challengers have - the lack of quality exclusive content. At least the iPhone (which is a poor gaming platform IMHO) has the benefit of being a popular smartphone first and foremost.

Is Panasonic serious?

Wow. That thing is ugly.

The only thing that could have saved it is World of Warcraft. If you could play WoW on that thing (BSG MMO? WTF?) it would actually have a chance. I call VaporWare!

Well, Panasonic was one of the manufacturers of the 3DO...

I wish Microsoft would do something like this so I could game on the go... but this Jungle thing will fail.

A Microsoft handheld would do reasonably well because of the built-in customer base and the available IPs. Hell, you could probably port original XBox games to a current-tech handheld. But an unaffiliated company has a huge uphill climb to crowd into a space occupied by Sony and Nintendo -- to say nothing of the fact that more and more people are gaming in smart phones/iPads.

I'd pay good money for that portable Xbox 360 that Ben Somethingorother built a few prototypes of a few years back... but my PSP collects dust and my DS was handed down to my daughter. Only my iPad gets consistent use.

Yeah, the PSP was easily the worst purchase I've ever made (says the guy that bought a 32X and Sega CD), and I don't see the Panasonic Jungle being any better than that.

The PSP has been way more successful than the Jungle has any hope of being. It just passed the lifetime sales of the Gameboy Advance in Japan (~15m) for example.

Can i Sidetalk with it?

Yup, the success of Monster Hunter gave the PSP a nice revival in Japan.. I've been playing it A LOT over the last year, possibly even more than all the other years of the system's life combined. Getting Ys SEVEN and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep back to back was just incredible for me, I'm going to have over 100 hours in Birth by Sleep when all is said and done.

Finally, something to replace my NGage.

The 3DO was not failure enough, they had to try again?