A Sony Ericsson phone will finally emerged about 4 years after we first discussed it, which is almost too late for Sony to keep control of its handheld gaming franchise.
It was only a year ago that Faultline wrote off the idea by saying that if it wasn’t out by Christmas 2009, there would be no point. But this is exactly what is planned, stated as a certainty by Engadget after a Sony Ericsson leak, and run along with a mock up photo and the idea that it will be out in time for THIS Christmas. Sony cannot both put out a new PlayStation Portable AND a phone which does the same job in the same year? Surely?
The thrust of the idea is that the phone will arrive when the Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) operating system arrives, and it will be a side slider, but instead of a keyboard sliding out from under the landscape screen, a dedicated gaming controller will slide out, looking just like a PSP controller.
Given how many of the iPhone App Store apps are games (around 70%), it would seem that this is shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. Apple has managed to entirely ‘take’ the handheld gaming market with both the iPhone and the iPod Touch, both devices which were never designed as gaming platforms.
The phone is seen as coming from Sony Ericsson, rather than Sony, something which was seen as improbable after public executive statements a year ago that Sony would forge ahead with its own phone design, because it could not reach agreement with its handset subsidiary. However some sources are suggesting that this gaming platform would owe something to the PlayStation brand, but even more to Google’s and its Android Market, which would attract the gaming developers which have pushed the iPhone and iPod Touch so aggressively. So it will look like a PlayStation but rely on apps which were designed or recently adapted to run with touch screens ‘ that doesn’t make sense and it is almost certainly going to rely on the existing base of PS1 and PS2 games, and miss out entirely on Android market touch sensitive games. Will the device even have accelerometers in it, so that it can play these games? We hope so but nothing would surprise us, and this is likely to be Sony barking down a blind alley while Apple steals away with the phone market.
Other features of the device are said to include a “long touch pad” for analog controls, something which suggests that it WILL have touch control as well, alongside standard PSP and shoulder buttons. The display will be between 3.7 and 4.1 inches, using 800’480 resolution, and coming with a 5 megapixel camera all running on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip.
The phone will be launched using either the Xperia or PlayStation brands, or maybe both. The big debate is whether this will have the processing power to play PSP game or even PS2 class games as well, and whether or not game developers will have to do much conversion before making the leap to the new phone. Engadget says it is being demoed with both types of games including God of War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
An optimistic timeframe is given as October, which is like we said last year, in time for both Thanksgiving in the US, and Christmas.