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."

Comments

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.