PlayStation-Based Mobile Handset a Possibility

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.'"

Comments

PlaystationPhone or PhonePlaystation?

[meist3r]

Sony is not exactly known for it's technological strategies in the last years. They sat heavy on their butt with overestimating the consumers need for a gaming platform/media system with the PS3 and unless they come up with a serious mobile strategy including software platform, app store, innovative applications and some incentive for customers to want to use their stuff I highly doubt this will make it that far. It's clearly aimed at countering the iPhone's growing stance as a mobile gaming platform but the iPhone has one important advantage: It's a platform not just a device. Sony has been building too many devices lately. Those don't sell too well on their own.

Re:PlaystationPhone or PhonePlaystation?

[R.Morton]

I don't know the DS and DSI are selling pretty well and they are just devices aren't they ?.

R.Morton

Re:PlaystationPhone or PhonePlaystation?

[AKAImBatman]

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?

[RogueyWon]

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.

Re:First Post

[_merlin]

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

[lee1026]

Considering how well camera phones are doing, I really don't think the "just a phone" sentiment is really what is successful in the marketplace. The iphone did a lot, and it sold a lot. And what is the most popular apps on the iphone? Games. It is logical to think, therefore, that a good game playing cell phone would sell, and if it did not, it would not be because it have too many features.

OOOOoohh

[nog_lorp]

Pee Ess Pee

The extended iPod

[G3ckoG33k]

"Actually the iPhone sold well because it is an apple product."

That is silly. Most of the people buying the iPhone, in terms of numbers, would probably be too young to have an idea of what is Apple Inc.

And, thy are definitely too young to realize about the Mac vs Wintel wars of two decades ago...

In fact, they might be more aware of Ubuntu versus Vista. But, to be honest, I don't think they even know of that.

They probably think of the iPhone as the mobile phone version of iPod, without realizing what is the name of the company behind it.

Re:The extended iPod

[Dogtanian]

Actually the iPhone sold well because it is an apple product. The phone itself sucks balls.

That is silly. Most of the people buying the iPhone, in terms of numbers, would probably be too young to have an idea of what is Apple Inc. [..] They probably think of the iPhone as the mobile phone version of iPod, without realizing what is the name of the company behind it.

That's pretty unlikely- I suspect that the vast majority certainly *do* "know" who Apple is. Yes, that's almost certainly via the success of the iPod, and it's quite probable that a significant number neither know nor care that Apple produces the Mac.

Still, however it got there, Apple is well-known and associated with fashionable technology.

While the majority of iPod/iPhone buyers almost certainly aren't as obsessed with Apple as the disproportionately vocal fanboy contingent, most of the potential audience will know Apple and associate them with "cool".

FWIW, I don't think that the iPhone sold solely because it was an Apple.

IMHO calling it a "phone" is also misleading. The iPhone is essentially a modern PDA with communications facilities; it's not really seen as such because PDAs fell out of favour a few years back and the iPhone arrived there via the phone route. But I suspect that had PDAs continued to sell and evolve, we'd have arrived in a similar place in 2009. No-one would buy the iPhone if it was simply just a phone, even a souped-up one with some nice tweaks.

Re:First Post

[_merlin]

Under 30, had a mobile phone for over a decade, was an early adopter of UMTS 3G (I had one of those huge first-generation NEC UMTS/GSM hybrid phones). I use my phone as a phone, and occasionally take a picture with it if I haven't got my camera with me. I occasionally use web/email on it, too, or use it as an HSDPA modem if I need the 'net on the go.

But I can see my phone is crap as a camera, web browser, game system, etc. The screen is too small to be a decent web browser or game system, the controls are designed for dialing a phone and navigating simple menus - not typing or playing games (which are at odds with each other, anyway). It's one of those Nokias with a Karl Zeiss lens on the camera, but it's still crap compared to my Casio compact camera (which itself isn't much bigger than the phone). Playing games or using the camera drains the battery. It's best to use it as a phone.

I have two Nintendo DS Lites, and I can say the DS is a good game system. The screens are bright and clear, the battery life is acceptable, and the controls are good for jabbing at with your thumbs. It would be horrible as a phone, though. The controls would be all wrong, it wouldn't fit in my pocket, etc. Jamming a phone into my compact camera would be a similarly bad idea.

It's cool to have additional functionality in a phone that can be used in a pinch when you don't have the real thing (games when I don't have the DS, camera when I don't have the Casio, web browser when I don't have a computer), but it should be designed primarily as a phone, or its usefulness as a phone will suffer, and trying to jam a phone into other devices would be a similar failure.

Do we really need a specialist Playstation phone?

[saihung]

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 ...

Mobile Cell CPU

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Mobile Cell CPU

[w0mprat]

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).

You're forgetting just how much power cell processors chug down. Even with only 1 or 2 SPEs and a downclocked PPC core and a narrower slower bus you won't be anywhere near a 1-3 watt envelope that's tolerable in something you can hold in your hand (ie. 2 hour battery life at full load). Try more like 15watts for the most cut-down cell.

Sony is likely to not be reinventing the wheel too much. MIPS32 architecture which already works well in the PSP (which has two of these processors). We'll be something similar along those lines, with up to day specs of course. Unfortunatley sony will be needing some new silicon if they want to get cell-compatible technology into the phone.