PSP owners in Europe and Japan can already purchase the Go! Explore GPS peripheral, which comes with maps of their respective regions and supports third-party city guide software. The Japanese GPS system costs about $60. The GPS receiver costs a little bit more in Europe at 119 Euros ($185 US).

We have been promised a GPS unit for North America since before the PSP launched, but nothing has materialized except for unfulfilled promises from Sony executives. Last week, company manager John Koller said that we could expect the unit sometime within the “next nine months”. This week, attendees at Comic Con were given a chance to check out an English language prototype of the device, although no firm release date has been given. Given the demand for such a device and the inclusion of GPS in other competing products like the new iPhone, why has it taken the company so long to bring a GPS unit to North American consumers?

One of the reasons for the delay has probably been cost. The price of GPS components has been gradually declining in recent years, but with the weak American dollar, the cost might put the peripheral out of most gamers’ price range. We expect that Sony would like to launch the device in the sub- $100 range, something that might take an improved US economy and a more streamlined production process to accomplish.

A second reason for the delay may be the cultural differences between North America and the rest of the world. Gamers in the US may not be too keen about a GPS-enabled city guide for the city they already live in, and without any games or other applications to take advantage of the peripheral, sales might be weaker than expected. We bet that a GPS unit won’t launch in North America without a killer application or game alongside it to drive sales. Sony and other companies have been hinting at GPS-enabled games for years, and this might just be the push required to make our dream of running through the streets like madmen a reality.