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.'"
PlaystationPhone or PhonePlaystation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:PlaystationPhone or PhonePlaystation? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the point is that the DS and DSi are focused gaming devices whereas the PSP is an unfocused, be everything to everyone, "device". Which I don't think is an entirely fair criticism.
IMHO, the PSP is not a game console. It just sucks as a portable game console. By the time you get your game loaded, you're already at your bus stop. Not to mention that the games tend to have the long-gameplay sensibilities of a home console rather than a portable system. I won't even get into the portability comparisons between the PSP and DS games.
The PSP is almost focused as if it were a Playstation that you could take to a friend's house. Or a portable DVD player. Or an emulator. In fact, it focuses well on just about everything except being a portable game console. (Whoops.)
Oddly, the DSi has bridged the jack-of-all-trades barrier a bit itself. It is not only a portable game system, but it is also a camera, music player, and portable web browser. It seems to succeed at these things not because it was so well designed for them, but rather because they were grown out of its existing capabilities rather than made a central focus of the system. In many ways the DSi does these features worse than the PSP, but the users appear to be happier with them. (Anyone notice that there is a DSiCade for the browser, but no PSPCade?)
Sony lacks focus. That is their core business issue, and why the PS3 and PSP have not been competing as well as they should.
Re:PlaystationPhone or PhonePlaystation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nintendo have ensured at a stroke that I will never pick up a DSi. They've region locked its software.
My morning commute isn't really handheld friendly (packed in like sardines on a short distance commuter train and then London Underground). The main use I get out of handhelds is when I travel, be it for business or personal reasons. And with the nature of my work, most of my business travel is to the States. I've always, therefore, kept a handheld (or several - I have a PSP and DS, which get around equal use) around for flights and for evenings stuck in crap hotels or conference centres in the middle of nowhere. The ability to buy games for my handhelds at either end of the journey is a sine qua non for me. In the past, it's not been much of an issue - handheld games were always region free. For Nintendo to now institute locking on the DSi just confirms my long standing suspicion that Nintendo's natural instinct is towards the kind of corporate ethics that would make even Sony and Microsoft blush (no mean feat), but that they've not previously been confident enough in their market position to give into this.
Do we really need a specialist Playstation phone? (Score:3, Interesting)
My Symbian phone is based on a successor architecture to the MIPS chip that was in the original PS1 and is an order of magnitude faster, which might simplify system emulation. If there were an official PS1 emulator for my phone (and that's what we're really talking about after all, isn't it?) I'd buy it. And since Sony already owns Connectix ...