Its disappearance is not the end of NGP's world

Sony held a press conference overnight last night concerning the recent hack and outage of the PlayStation Network. While the company is restoring certain features of the PSN by week’s end (like online gaming, friend lists and chat), full restoration of the PSN, including the ability to download content from the PlayStation Store, may take up to a month to get back online.

With Sony refocusing so much of its resources on getting its online services up to snuff, many have likely been wondering whether or not this recent security debacle would delay the release of the NGP.

Thankfully, in a statement to Reuters, Sony assured us that the rebuilding of the PSN and overhaul of its security system would not affect the upcoming release of the handheld. From Reuters:

A massive security breach on its PlayStation Network service will at this point not have an impact on its planned launch of tablet PCs and its Next Generation Portable (NGP) portable games device, the company said on Sunday.

[source ngportable.com, via in.reuters.com]