Panasonic is set to enter the gaming market up against Sony with their PSP and Nintendo with their DSi handheld gaming device.According to the Japanese newspaper Daily Yomiuri Panasonic is set to reenter the market as early as next year when they will release a portable game player device. The new online game player is foldable and equipped with a keyboard and a touch pad, enabling users to exchange messages with other gamers online the newspaper said.Panasonic, which marketed its first home video game 3DO Real in 1994 but pulled out from the game industry only three years later, hopes to capitalise on a booming popularity of online gaming with the release of a handheld console provisionally named “Jungle.”

Panasonic has already started offering the products to consumers for testing in the USA. After analyzing consumers’ impressions of the game device, the home electrical appliance giant will decide when to put it on the market and at what price. It has not yet been determined if Panasonic will release the game player in Japan.

Speculation is mounting that Panasonic will officially show the device at the 2011 CES in Las Vegas in January.

The Daily Yomiuri said that it has been been extremely difficult for Panasonic to penetrate the game software market  as Sony and Nintendo dominate distribution channels around the world.

However the Japanese Company is confident that traditional retailers of their products such as JUB Hi Fi and Harvey Norman in Australia, Best Buy in the USA and Dixons’s in the UK will stock the product when they launch the new product in 2011.