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

That could be pretty cool

[Nursie]

I know, I know, it's hip on /. to hate Sony for their DRM and rootkits, and their music division *can* go screw themselves in the eye over that one.

But I like their consumer electronics, they're pretty and they're slick. A game device/phone coming from such a giant could be a huge thing.

Re:That could be pretty cool

[Canazza]

the N-Gage was more a gaming console than it was a phone (Atleast, the first one was) and it wasn't terrible. It had a few good games on it, but the catalogue was meagre at best. And using it as a phone was laughable. It felt like holding a banana to your head.

The second one was better on the banana front, but again, a lack of games and marketing doomed it to failure.

Sony has alot of gaming clout, and any hand-held phone/console would most likely be able to run existing PSP games, giving it a significant back catalogue to start out with.

Re:That could be pretty cool

[Blue_Wombat]

Their DRM and rootkits provide ample grounds to passionatley hate Sony, and I do. However, these aren't the entirety of the story, and its more than just this that we hate them for. It's also the fact that they seem to hate their paying customers and operate in their own parallel universe. Proprietary connectors, feature lockouts, unfriendliness to people modding the equipment that they have bought, radio station payola, and an incessant drive to establish their own standards rather than use an industry standard unless it's so entrenched they have no point. Case in point, work gave me a SE phone recently (not one that I would have picked myself - I buy *nothing* with the Sony name on it, and haven't since I inadvertently brought one of their DRM-crippled non-CDs in 2003 and couldn't transfer it to y media player). Anyway, superficially it's a nice bit of kit. However, when I go to upgrade the memory it won't take any of the industry standard cards that I already have - oh no, I need a Sony brand "pro duo" stick that no one else uses, can't be used in anything else, and mysteriously costs about 2.5x normal on a $/GB basis. Then I go to plug headphones in so I can listen to music, the phone has a headphone connector, but instead of using a standard 3.5mm jack Sony have gone with 2.5mm, which you can't get in this country - not even the damn Sony store has them. Then their is the gross hypocrisy a few years ago when the head of Sony music in this country was also serving as the head of the RIANZ (our equivalent of the RIAA) and issuing hysterical media statements about how anyone who format a CD that they purchased to an ipod or music jukebox was "stealing" and should and would be prosecuted. Funnily, at the same time, Sony was selling a hard drive based jukebox that let you do just that - and even had pictures of the shelves of CDs you could transfer hand have available at a push of the button in the window of the Sony dealer in the CBD as advertising. Presumably, Sony didn't then prosecute themselves...... Personally, I think that Sony is over large, arrogant, and severely ethically challenged. I go out of my way to avoid them, ensure that tender bids featuring Sony equipment (eg laptops) don't succeed when I am charged with evaluating them, and dissuade friends from buying their kit. Also, other than for their top line gear, the manufacturing has been moved to China anyway, and quality is no better that kit selling for half the price. I took great pleasure in refusing to support short-listing a bid to supply a fair number of Sony laptops in response to a tender last year, so at least I get some satisfaction along the way .....

Pretty, yes, slick, no

[Chuck Chunder]

These days the usability of a device has to be counted as a significant part of it's slickness. Sony devices get marks for looking nice when they are turned off but always seem to fall short when you want to use them.

Too little too late

[WeirdingWay]

They'll never compete with the App Store and the momentum it's built. Knowing Sony they'll come up with a new proprietary hardware format and given their history, odds are not in favor of its survival.

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.

Competition!

[Frogbert]

This is more competition in the market, it can only be a good thing.

If it sucks, no one will buy it, if it has great features, other phones will innovate to keep up.

Homebrew?

[tepples]

SCEA PR rep Al De Leon said:

The goal in that is to enable all sorts of developers to be able to develop content for the PSP

Did he intend to include developers who operate out of home offices (like Apple's iPhone model, which copied Microsoft's XNA model)? Or is "all sorts of developers" limited to established companies with an office building and a published title on another platform, like it was on prior Sony and Nintendo platforms?

Re:Good luck with that.

[paintballer1087]

Not to nitpick at that quote, but I guess I will anyway. It was actually:

Quintus: "People should know when they are conquered."
Maximus: "Would you, Quintus? Would I?"