New Sony PSP in 2006 With hard Drive?

GameBiz Daily reports that in his latest research note, Piper Jaffray analyst Anthony Gikas is predicting a brand-new PSP model next year. "We also expect Sony to launch the next generation of its PSP (including an audio/video hard-drive) in mid-2006," Gikas said.

The article questions why Sony would launch "a new PSP so soon after the introduction of their very first portable game system." One guess is to "expand the PSP's multimedia capabilities (something the portable is already doing very well with) by including greater storage space" via a hard drive to take on the iPod and other protable media devices.

Would love to see what the BOM cost for that baby would be with the nice big screen, proprietary UMD drive and a hard drive as well. Figure the hard drive alone will add an extra $90-100 so unless the costs of other components drop a lot, we're looking at a retail price in the $300 range. Or else Sony can sell it at a bigger loss....