GO! TIME: REGARDING THIS WEEKEND’S PSP GO LEAK

For the small handful of you that hadn’t yet heard, a quick recap: that low but growing squeeee you might’ve heard Saturday afternoon was the deflating balloon sound of one of Sony’s biggest E3 surprises — their new model PSP, the Go (and with it confirmation/video of portable LittleBigPlanet, Metal Gear and Gran Turismo games) — being unceremoniously leaked early via their PS3 downloadable TV show Qore.

The full-body-wince irony is that ridiculous cloak and dagger dressing they chose for their Qore reveal — which likely was meant to be set live this Thursday, two days after this coming Tuesday’s E3 press conference.

But, with the lesson learned and the damage irreversible, Rob over at BBG rounds up the specs that set it apart from the standard PSP — 3.8″ display, 16GB of flash storage, a Memory Stick slot, and Bluetooth — and offers a smart look back at former Sony devices that show some of its industrial design roots.

The biggest change for the device, is of course not necessarily one of form factor but of content delivery: without a physical UMD slot, the Go represents Sony’s boldest push yet into digital realms, and thus will not replace but sit alongside (for now) the company’s PSP-3000, ensuring that retail (by which I mean the fierce sleeping giant GameStop) is not cut entirely out of the mix.

But! The most Offworld-ready tidbit of information out of the stilted conversation above — and offered almost entirely in passing — is Koller’s admission that there’ll be a renewed initiative to bring smaller (read: indie?) PSP offerings to the device as well. While Sony’s been doing a better job at re-releasing older UMD releases via digital means, there’s still only a very small handful of dedicated digital PSP releases on the PlayStation Network, and even then mostly downscaled handheld ports of PS3 originals (see: fl0w or Everyday Shooter).

This, then, apparently shows Sony hoping to step into somewhat the same arena as Nintendo — with its newly launched DSiWare — the ever-present iPhone, and whatever XNA-on-Zune handheld initiatives Microsoft might be announcing in a matter of hours, which it first revealed at GDC 2008 and which seems to have gone almost entirely forgotten since.