For a very brief period in late 2010, Panasonic decided enough time had passed since they were dabbling in games as a 3DO licensee, and it was time to announce a handheld supposedly designed for playing MMOs on the go.
The whole project was a string of very strange decisions which made it not at all surprising that the handheld never saw the light of day. First off, the good: The system seems to be sensible enough to include controls that at least make sense for MMOs, namely a d-pad, mouse touchpad, and a qwerty keyboard. The clamshell design on the prototype doesn't even look too bad when closed, though when opened it looks closer to a cheap panini press - even the promising allegedly-720p screen looks like it was held in with gobs of glue. There was even a 3G model planned for the Jungle - a smart idea for an online-only handheld!
Now on to the bad, and there's a lot to talk about. The console ran an ARM chip (Likely an Nvidia Tegra 1 or 2 based on early reports), which is a decent choice for a handheld but a very odd choice for an MMO-focused handheld. Panasonic also seems to have taken the traditional proprietary platform approach for the software. These factors would require all MMO ports to be bespoke ports to the hardware, which for a new player in the space, is... bold, to put it lightly.
MMOs are massive endeavors that constantly receive new content updates, and all platforms must receive new content updates roughly in sync if they are using the same servers. An MMO supporting a new platform isn't a one-and-done thing like porting a single-player game - it's a multi-year commitment to keep it supported and up-to-date. This is even MORE difficult on lower-power handhelds where often assets must be remade specifically to run well on them. This is very rare, but not unprecedented - PSO2 on the Vita was supported as a core platform for a long time, even including features like online play over 3G so your game won't become a paperweight if you don't have access to Wi-Fi. But you can see why it isn't common to see MMOs make it to handhelds.
Now imagine trying to convince developers to make that commitment to a basically-new player in the space on a handheld with specs barely above a modern smartphone, where the only other games available will be your direct competitors in the genre, and when the 3DS and Vita will likely make it to market within the next year anyway. It's not hard to see why this never made it out of the public prototype stage.
A mere 4 games were ever listed as planned for the Jungle:
-Battlestar Galactica Online -Runescape -Stellar Dawn -World of Warcraft
And even that list is highly dubious, as the only real source for half of those is the fly-by-night "panasonicjungle.com". You may ALSO notice that half of this list are browser games, both by Jagex, and one of those two never even released ANYWHERE. That's right, half the lineup was just whatever someone figured could already run in a web browser on most any device. Excellent showcase for your new high-end enthusiast handheld! Also, I can find no sources at all - shady or trustworthy - that claim WoW was actually announced for the system, so I highly doubt that Blizzard would have made that commitment when the game has notoriously never left PCs to this day.
So that's the Jungle - I wish I had more to say about it, but the system was cancelled a mere 5 months after its announcement in October of 2010, and even in that time, almost no new info was released about it from Panasonic. All I can offer is some parting speculation: My best guess is that this was the pet project for some executive at Panasonic or their kid - the kind of gamer who was really into MMOs and didn't really understand the games market beyond that. (u know, the average MMO player :v :v) They likely kept forcing it through, expecting it would pan out without really checking back in or consulting around the industry first, until eventually someone explained to them that this was an atrocious idea and they finally caved and killed the project. That's just my best guess, but it seems probable based on how the project emerged out of nowhere and disappeared just as suddenly. Gaming can be a very weird industry sometimes, friends.
