We’ve been seeing leaks for quite a while of the supposedly Playstation Phone, that won’t actually be called like that, but rather an extension of the XPERIA brand. That’s because this phone won’t support any of the older PSP games, so what they are doing here is trying to create a whole new market of PSP-like phones and PSP-like games.
Apparently, they are even going to leverage some of their partnerships with game developers, like the guys who made Tekken, and the phone will include 5 free games. We’ve also heard that the phone will have a unique market for games, probably because the games will not work through touch input, but through the physical controllers alone. Fortunately, the games will cost like any other mobile game, under $10, not under $40 like PSP games.
The screen is supposed to be “mind-blowing”, similar to iPhone’s 4 Retina Display, and use screen technology used in Bravia TV’s. I certainly hope they are not overstating here. They might be referring only to the quality of the display, not the high pixel density, too, which would be disappointing. Since we’ve learned that Honeycomb tablets will come with 1280×800 resolution, I hope Sony managed to put this into their phone, too. But that might be unlikely, especially if it doesn’t have a dual core chip like Tegra 2 or Orion to power that kind of resolution.
This brings us to another point where the Playstation Phone might disappoint. It’s supposed to offer the “best mobile gaming”, but since it was rumored before to only have a 1 Ghz processor, I don’t see how their gaming would be that great after we’ve seen what kind of amazing 3D games are coming to Tegra 2 phones (and other OpenGL ES 2.0 phones).
Hopefully, Sony has become a lot more serious about the smartphone market, since the XPERIA umm… experience. I don’t want them to release another phone that is obsolete in both hardware and software on the day of launch, sometime in February. It would certainly look like that if their phone only has 1 Ghz CPU, while other dual core phones are already in the market – like the upcoming Motorola Olympus. Even LG is supposed to launch a Tegra 2 phone early next year, and they’ll probably launch it before Sony, too.