The PSP is beginning to fulfill its potential

Of course, Sony's GDC Europe conference wasn't put on entirely for the benefit of the Playstation 3 Slim, despite the impatience of the crowd. Sony's handheld console got a turn in the spotlight as well, with a handful of brief announcements to cheer fans of go-anywhere entertainment.

Sony Europe CEO Andrew House revealed a new, specialist PSP area in the Playstation Store, a range of new colours for the fashion conscious gamer, and a quasi-Kindle substitute in the form of a "digital reader".

The new Playstation Store mini-site will be dubbed PSP Minis, and will focus on providing "small" games - low priced titles that make barely a blip in your download quota, since they're capped at 100 MB in size. No titles were confirmed for this service, but EA will apparently have a couple of games ready when PSP Minis launches in October, similar to their App Store offerings for the iPhone.

After the big splash that was the PSP Go, it's not surprising that things are a little quiet on the hardware side of things, but three new colours are on their way to potential PSP purchasers, although none of them are particularly macho.

The new colours are to be bundled with new releases; LittleBigPlanet will co-ordinate nicely with the Turquoise Green model, while fans of the delicate Violet will have to own a copy of the latest Hannah Montana title. The Pink PSP's bundled game has not yet been revealed, but I suspect it's not going to be anything with explosions, except perhaps explosions of make up and ponies.

While the new colours are only confirmed for European release, we might, as usual, manage to slide under the PAL territory umbrella and get a look in on them ourselves.

Another "might not apply to Australia" item, and one falling very firmly in the "motivations for emigrating" category is the Digital Reader; presumably able to display standard format eBooks and .pdf files, the Digital Reader will also support a service called Digital Comics. Marvel are the first publisher to sign up for the service, with titles like Spider-Man, The X-Men and The Fantastic Four on the cards.

We'll have to wait a few days until official pronouncements start to filter out the "Europe-only" news from those that apply to us, and many of these announcements will be more fully explained at the upcoming Tokyo games Show, so more details as and when we have them.