With the Slim model and the price cut being the biggest news from the GamesCom conference yesterday, there were a couple surprise announcements made that were overshadowed by the news. These had a bit of promise and are definitely something worth mentioning at least.

First up is the PSP Minis store. This store will be selling games at a cheaper price than full retail titles. Basically, they’re a bunch of mini games netting in 100MBs or less and are also a lot cheaper for developers to work on as well, so it could potentially become a booming business much like the iPhone app store. As far as when it will be available, Sony has stated at the conference that it will launch along with the PSP Go on October 1st with 15 games and 50 games will be available by the end of the year. The applications will work on an older model PSP as well, you’d just have to save it to a memory stick rather than a flash drive.

Another application that Sony is currently working on is a Digital Reader (called Digital Comics) for PSP (it’d be awesome if they got it on PS3, too, which I’m sure is also in the works). Basically, the program acts as a comic book reader and also has an auto run function that sounds like it will automatically go to the next frame to continue the story. Right now, Sony’s only mentioned Marvel Comics is on board, and when the program launches in December, Spider-Man, X-Men and the Fantastic Four will be first to be released, followed by Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine and the Incredible Hulk (among many others) at a later time. The trailer does mention thousands of Marvel comics will be made available, though. Sony has also stated that other publishers will be announced soon.

Not only will comic books be available, though. Sony is also planning on using it for graphic novels and others as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if they expanded it to the point where you can download and read actual novels like the Kindle. Could bring in a lot of revenue there…

Also, a last bit of PSP news, if you pre-order Gran Turismo 5, you’ll get a free voucher to download Gran Turismo for PSP when it’s released. Pretty sweet deal there!

Source Thanks to Thepreppymonk for finding the trailers on Joystiq, letting me know they were available 🙂