A mysterious new handset from Sony will challenge Apple's dominance by drawing upon the company's gaming background.
Having watched its increasingly weak-looking MP3 players and phones pummeled to dust by both Apple’s iPod and iPhone, Sony has finally iced its bruises and reentered the ring. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Japanese company is plotting its own game-savvy smartphone to battle Apple’s iPhone.
According to the Journal, Sony engineers are toiling away on “a portable device that blurs distinctions among a netbook, an e-reader and a PlayStation Portable.” It will also knit in tightly with Sony’s iTunes-like media store, a marketplace for music, video and games set to debut later this month.
Although the phone will wear a Sony Ericsson badge, reports say Sony will take a “more active” role in developing the handset. Senior Vice President Kunimasa Suzuki, who has hands in both the Vaio and PlayStation teams, will lead up its development, further corroborating its focus on gaming capabilities.
Few other details of the phone are known at this time, but Sony apparently hopes for a launch within 2010.
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RSSSony Finally Releasing PlayStation Phone!
March 11, 2010 10:45 am
The Sony rumor that just won't die has reared its beautiful head for the last time: a PSP phone is now 100% officially in the works. The latest news comes courtesy of Japan's Nikkei Business Daily, and The Wall Street Journal which both say Sony has opened up a new department that will develop a "cell phone-game gear hybrid," . Sony's department with will be a joint effort between Sony Ericsson and SCEA which will begin work as early as April.
The obvious target of Sony's plan is Apple's iPhone. Since the introduction of the iPhone, gaming has been front and center in Apple's iPhone-iTunes App Store ecosystem. Nine of Apple's top ten iPhone applications are games, and mainstream game publishers have for some time been incorporating the iPhone into their plans. Even the iPhone jailbreaking community is getting into gaming by using the iPhone to emulate original PlayStation games.
Sony, meanwhile, is struggling to maintain relevance with its mobile gaming platforms, the PlayStation Portable, and the PSP Go. Despite the PSP and PSP Go's slightly better graphics, the iphone (and ipod touch) has grabbed hold of the handheld gaming market and shows no sign of letting go.
Since the introduction of the App Store in 2008, the iphone has become a mobile gaming juggernaut that has seemingly come out of nowhere. With the forthcoming launch of the iPad, whose larger screen and more powerful CPU could make it a gaming powerhouse as well, it means there are now three very big players in the mobile gaming market and Sony is in an untenable position already.
Sony is hoping to change that. According to a leak to the Wall Street Journal, Sony is hard at work developing a range of handheld products designed to compete directly with Apple's mobile platform. One, a revamped and redesigned PSP Go that will now be able to make phone calls in tandem with Sony Ericsson, would be designed to compete with the iPhone and iPod touch; the other, a hybridization of a PSP, e-reader, and netbook, would be Sony's answer to the iPad. Both devices would have a dedicated online store available to them, but the store itself isn't scheduled for deployment until September of this year. The new revamped PSP Go (aka PSP phone) isn't scheduled to be released unitl sometime in October or November of this year.
What's strange is that a PSP phone was a no-brainer two years ago, especially since the iPhone continues to take bigger chunks out of the mobile gaming market.
But then again, Sony isn't known for its capability to detect changes in consumer behavior. Sony's Walkman lost out to Apple's iPod before the company ever knew what a click wheel was, Microsoft's Xbox 360 is outshining the PlayStation 3, and Nintendo has already beaten out the PSP and current PSP Go with its Nintendo DSi lineup. A revamped PSP Go that makes phone calls will give Sony a shot to regain some lost ground; however, anything short of a fully functioning PSP combined with an intuitive smartphone just won't do. As Ray Kurzweil would say, "the singularity is near." Sony needs one device that can do it all, just like the iPhone can. The stakes are high, but if Sony does get it right and comes out with a better PSP Go that can make phone calls, well, that's what you could legitimately call an iPhone killer.