I hate saying "take this with a grain of salt", but it's what all the popular kids do so I'll go ahead and add that disclaimer here. File this squarely under the rumor section, apart from the fact that it comes from Aint It Cool News (they don't do videogames very often) it's also from a new writer who claims to have been given the info by a source called "Proteus" (oooh! Clandestine!). Why someone high up would decide to just gift the kind of information every single gaming news outlet on the planet is looking to get their hands on to Aint It Cool is beyond me, but here's the word:

Here’s a bit of info that I chanced into the other day, from a rather well-placed source named Proteus. He CONFIRMED a few details that were already rumored around the Net.

Seems Sony’s current internal plans call for a release of a refitted PSP around Christmas this year. The device will, indeed, be streamlined (thinner), lighter, boast 4 gigs of memory and a camera. Proteus indicated Sony is having a hell of a time with PlayStation 3 on several fronts (between PS3’s Cell processor and its built-in Blu-ray DVD, cost effectiveness has pretty much gone out the window). Seems the ever-phantasmic PS3 may well be delayed until next year, with Sony’s reworked PSP being positioned as a lead-in to its release (in the same way Nintendo’s release of the oh-so-sexy DS Lite heralds the coming of Revolution).

The PSP redesign is entirely possible, although it would be a crying shame for those of us that jumped on the PSP bandwagon so early (the systems only now starting to get good games!), but then Sony is no stranger to repackaging their hardware (they did it with the PSOne and the PSTwo) to make it cheaper to produce, and the rumors have been swirling around the possibility for a while now, but who thought it would happen so soon?

This PS3 launching next year news is what's particularly hard to believe. Sony has constantly gone on record reaffirming a Spring launch, now, however unlikely that is it seems Sony would realise that they need to get the console out the door and in the North American and Japanese markets by Fall at the latest, a delay till next year would give Microsoft an almost definitely insurmountable lead and likely insure the cheaper Revolution second place in the market. This seems to be the going phrase at the moment, but Sony ain't that stupid!