PlayStation-Based Mobile Handset a Possibility 61
Speaking with Financial Times, Hideki Komiyama, president of Sony Ericsson, raised the possibility of a mobile handset based on PlayStation gaming. The company has been struggling to find an answer to current smartphones, and they plan to release three new models within the next year which run Symbian, Android, and Windows Mobile. Komiyama likened a PlayStation-related handset to the music-based Walkman handset and the camera-based Cybershot handset. Quoting the FT: "He expresses interest in Sony Ericsson carving out a niche for itself based on Sony's strength in gaming. He says a PlayStation mobile, building on the Walkman and Cybershot phones, 'could happen.'"
Re:First Post (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, when will they realise that people don't want combo phone/other gadget devices? You want your phone the be light and have good battery life. Combining it with other devices makes it bigger and heavier, and using the other functionality drains the battery. You want your phone with you all the time, too, and the ergonomic characteristics that are desirable for a phone aren't suitable for other gadgets (and vice versa). Just look at the N-Gage for an example of why it's a bad idea.
Re:First Post (Score:1, Informative)
Actually the iPhone sold well because it is an apple product. The phone itself sucks balls.
Mobile Cell CPU (Score:3, Informative)
The Playstation 3 runs on the Cell CPU, which an extremely powerful multiprocessing chip. It's also extremely high yield in manufacturing, because defective chips usually just lose one or more of the parallel DSPs, but otherwise work just great. Which makes each chip cheaper, since the expense of the whole manufacturing (and R&D) run is spread across a lot more chips sold, many of which are discarded in less efficient processes.
Mobile Cell chips could be simply the lower-grade chips with just one or a few DSPs working, but otherwise superfast (3.2GHz PPC, wicked fast bus, etc). They're programmed exactly the same as the higher grade Cells, because the Cell itself allocates however many DSPs are working. The dead DSPs don't even suck power.
And Linux already runs great on the Cell (as in Linux on Playstation), with the main OS on the PPC and multimedia offloaded to the DSPs.
I would love to see a Linux "PlayPhone" that runs the same SW as a PS3, as a desktop, as a server, etc, but with different features depending on the full complement of HW in the device.