The PSP has fought a hard pitched battle against some incredibly strong competition from the Nintendo DS and its later version, the DS Lite. But while the DS has been racking up some three million sales in the UK alone, Sony has paid depressingly little attention to its handheld console over the past year or so.

That Sony has been beavering away making its high definition home console, the PS3, is probably a fair excuse. However, now that it has launched across all three major regions, some more successfully than others, isn’t it time that Sony took a fresh look at the PS3’s more diminutive counterpart?

Well, that’s just what Sony is planning to do next. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Sony UK boss, Ray Maguire has confirmed that it is time for the PSP to get the lovin’ it deserves. “We've been putting quite a lot of energy behind PS3, now we'll be able to split some of those resources and go back to the PSP to make sure we've got some compelling games coming” said Maguire.

Of course, one reason for the lacklustre sales of the PSP has to do with a lack of stand out titles, and first-party development tends to yield better results for console manufacturers (good example - Locoroco). This at least is one problem Sony plans to address: “From a PSP situation we have a wider split of third-party versus first-party than our competitors do, who are very much first-party developers. We've been putting quite a lot of energy behind PS3, now we'll be able to split some of those resources and go back to the PSP to make sure we've got some compelling games coming.”

Despite these encouraging sentiments, it is clear that Sony would still prefer to see the PSP as a counterpart to the PS3, more than a console in its own right. Maguire is perhaps a little too keen to sell up the PSP-PS3 interconnectivity features; “Now there's a relationship between PS3 and PSP. When you download the 1.6 firmware and you start to see the remote play aspect – access to all your media in another room – you'll start to see that there's this connection between the two devices and this is going to increase quite dramatically. That kind of technology in going to be used in the future to enhance gameplay.”

Truly great news for PS3 owners, but that isn't going to do much to enhance gameplay if you, er, don’t own a PS3…

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