Gamers continue to wait for a price point when it comes to Sony’s latest reveal, the Next Generation Portable — or the PlayStation Portable 2. Despite being a somewhat poorly kept secret, the device has managed to blow people’s minds and is looking like it could be the greatest hand held ever produced.

However, gamers know Sony all too well and a lot expect the company to price themselves almost completely out of the market like they did with the PlayStation 3. Thankfully SCE President Shuhei Yoshida realizes that Sony can’t make the same mistake twice and has confirmed the device will not cost an arm and a leg.

“There were elements that we found pretty cool, but had to set aside to remain on target,” Sony Computer Entertainment president Shuhei Yoshida told the latest issue of Edge magazine.

“It’s a big lesson we learnt from the PS3. There’s no point putting everything you want into a device and doing the math later. We always had the price and consumer in mind. We had to sell something that people could buy.”

Another positive decision Sony has made with the NGP was not creating a new architecture for the device which would force developers to learn something new. Now, they can easily look at the NGP and just see it as an extension of the PlayStation 3 — which should result in quality titles at a faster pace than standard platform launches.

“We had to make the development environment for NGP as ‘easy’ as possible,” he said.

“Today, many teams are familiar with the PS3 and are used to including a variety of effects in their titles.

“Based on this expertise – and also the working habits they developed working on PS3 – we had to make development on the NGP as natural as possible – an extension of the PS3, if you will.”

All of this is great news — but it will become even better once Sony finally reveals the pricing. I think if they hit the $250-300 plateau, they’ll do magnificent, but if they price it at $349, they’re going to run into some trouble.