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Sony SmartPhone To Work With PS2
thryllkill writes "Yahoo is reporting a new Sony plan to implement a telephone that can talk to a Play Station 2. Of course it pushing the idea of training characters for games on the run, but wasn't this already tried with the VMU? ."
That's bloody scary. I'm sure this is exactly the thing my gamer addict friends need to help them kick the habit. um..no.
What with mobile gaming, instant messaging, and various other communication devices a veritable electronic culture is right on the horizon - it seems a bit like the navi-obsessed youth in Lain. The question is if it's better, worse, or somewhere to the side.
but wasn't this already tried with the VMU?
Don't forget the Sony PocketStation which came out at about the same time as the Dreamcast with its VMU. It plugged into the memory port of the PS1. It was never sold in the US, but the US version of Final Fantasy VIII had support for it (documented in the manual, even.)
Ian
True, but such a ridiculous idea could make sony lots of money. I see this as simply one more scheme in an attempt to make the PS2 the low-budget network/gaming/communications applicance in the home.
Heck, who needs a PC or imac when a PS2 with net access will do what 90% of people want anyways!
The real question is... can they pull it off?
The PC version of FFVIII had the "missing" pocketstation feature of the Chocobo game. It was a seperate app that you could open up, aside from the actual game.
Frankly, this "Insightful" comment is way overrated. It displays a lack of insight and only demonstrates the cultural blinders of its author.
The fact of the matter is that 'synergy' or 'convergence' or any of the other buzzwords that have been floated to describe the merging of all mobile devices into a single uber-device have at their core a fundamental paradigmatic misfire. They all attempt to graft phone features onto a PDA or MP3 players into the PDA. However, all of these are too bulky, fragile, and are usually too much hassle to use (Treo, for example) to be of any practical use.
The Japanese have hit on the obvious solution. Forget the fucking PDA altogether. Phones are the optimal size for personal digital assistants. The trick is to shrink the rest of the crap into the phone's size. NTT has made some progress in this area with i-mode through the use of Java applets that run on the phone. Screen size is not a problem, Asian phones sport much larger color screens within a thinner shell. There really isn't a reason to be stuck with the crappy 1"x1" screens that Nokia's trying to force on Western consumers.
Gaming as an extension of the PS2 (or really any machine, for that matter) is simply another extension of the phone. If it is insightful to wear blinders or to purposefully ignore the improvements in design that are happening everywhere but in the U.S., then perhaps the OP should be modded up +5.
I tried out one of those Pikachu tamagotchi things a while back, but it's an awfully useless thing to have clipped to your belt. My keyring is so full of keys that nothing plastic survives on it for very long. I carry around a TRGpro, so if someone wants me to play their game anywhere it better damn well work on a grayscale Palm with OS 3. And quite frankly, a little PalmOS app that could read and interact with a save game from a standard flash card (CF for me, MMC/SD for most other new Palm owners) wouldn't be too hard to write. Oh, that's right, none of the games consoles use standard flash RAM...
calling people is overrated. now I'm a hightech worker and as such am being overpaid and am expected to have the cool toys.
I mean I was given a new nokia the other day, i currently own an ericsson and the nokia was smaller with a longer battery. but i gave it to a friend because i wanted to keep my ericsson... why??
because my phone has tetris and pacman....
YES thats the only reason..... dont say noone will buy one... because at the moment I'm eyeing up the new ericcson with java.. JUST SO I CAN PLAY GAMES!!
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
Remember all of these services are already available in Japan and it seems to be working just fine.
IIRC, Sony previously mentioned it wasn't about to enter the whole portable gaming domain with a portable Sony system to rival Nintendo's GameBoy series. They always said that cellphones and palms-devices would be where people will be playing portable games in the future.
Nintendo is totally unchallenged in the portable gaming area right now. Maybe it's just feature bloat in cellphones now... but I think Nintendo should be watching this very closely.
Since Sony was seriously talking about making the Playstation the center of your entertainment unit, how long before you can simply call up your PS2 and tell it to record a TV program for you?
Of course, this might mean you might also start getting calls from the PS2...
Imagine having to tell your boss you have to go home to finish MGS3, because if you don't, the villian in the game will start deleting your MP3 collection.