Sony Pondering Game/Phone Hybrid

A report from a Japanese business publication says Sony is currently making plans to develop a cell phone with gaming capabilities in order to compete with the iPhone. "Sony plans to set up a project team as early as July to develop a new product that combines functions of its portable game player and Sony Ericsson's mobile phones, the Nikkei said." This comes shortly after news that the new PSP Go will be open to "non-gaming applications."

Unless they have some sort of haptics

[antifoidulus]

I doubt they will make anything all that good. Part of the problem with the game/phone combination is that the input devices for one don't necessarily coorespond to the other. Apple solved this by getting rid of all "hard" buttons(save for one) and replacing it with a touch screen. This works for some games, but many of the games I play use a joystick and the "soft" joystick on the iPhone doesn't cut it. If my finger slips I lose a lot of reaction time trying to find the button again, so the all soft approach doesn't work either. However, if Sony would get back to the old days of innovating, it would be awesome if Sony could introduce some haptics to allow the touch screen to give physical feedback when playing a game.

Re:That could be pretty cool

[Aceticon]

Hating Sony for their DRM and rootkits is dumb: one should use cold hard logic and look at the DRM and rootkit in the context of the wider corporate policy.

Application of cold hard logic to Sony's behavior shows that they turned from a company whose main drive was to create excellent products (once upon a time they were known for the exceptional quality of their products) into one whose main drive is to squeeze as much revenue as possible from their customers, often in deceitful ways such as sneaking into their products built-in limitations in such a way that people don't know about them until after they got those products. The DRM and the rootkit are just some of the most well known (around here) examples of that.

It's like as if you go buy to a hardware store and buy a "high-performance" hammer from a well known company which used to sell great product. The handle is improperly preserved wood and the head is low quality steel so it doesn't last more than a couple of months. You go and buy a specialist screwdriver from the same company and it turns out the tip is soft iron that looses it shape in a couple of months. With most companies, at this point most people would start thinking that their products are now crap, designed to fail in a couple of months so that you buy new ones.
With Sony, it seems there are people which are still dazzled by their past performance (or maybe the complexity inherent to software-hardware mixes) and keep on ignoring the signs that what they do now is designed for restricted and time-limited functionality.

That said, I expect that this new Sony Game/Phone hybrid will come with interesting and exciting new ways for consumer lock in and Digital Right retrictions - all of which will be of course relegated to the really small print in their adverts and prospectus.