This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Engadget are reporting that Sony Ericsson are working on a phone that runs Android 3.0 and will have PlayStation branding. Of course, the games press are reporting this without much, if any, scrutiny. So far, the only scrutiny on the whole thing has been from Digital Foundry, and they make some really good points.
Sony has been working on the PSP2 for some years now and the creation of a brand new handheld gaming machine based on off-the-shelf parts and completely divorced from the far more advanced PSP2 specs seems difficult to reconcile: Sony really needs complete convergence between a phone and its new handheld in order to make an impact.
They’re right; this can’t be half-assed. The PSP needs to be a proprietary platform or it loses every single selling point it currently has.
More than that, the notion of Sony investing so much in a gaming platform that can only match the visuals of the handheld platform it already has simply doesn't compute. Similarly incongruous is the talk of a new gaming "ecosystem" with Google involvement, bearing in mind that Sony already has an established, successful platform in the form of the PlayStation Network.
Bang on the money and again, exactly what I thought when I read this rumour. Sony have been bigging up the PlayStation Network as an all-encompassing service. Why give that to Google all of a sudden? Despite all of this, I do have a couple of points to add:
Mobile platforms – iOS and Android – are notorious for being hacked and running pirated software. Piracy was one of the reasons that the PSP hasn’t been as successful as it could’ve been in the first place, so why would they move their entire portable gaming platform to an open source mobile platform that will be hacked within days? It would be even worse than the PSP’s piracy woes because, eventually, all those PSP games running on Android would be able to run on any phone that has the later version of the OS and ample specs with which to play them. They’d have to be brain dead to do that!
And what benefit would it be to SCE to surrender games to Sony Ericsson? I know that the bosses at Sony are trying to make the company less factional and more cohesive – divisions have to work together on stuff – but what benefit is there to the gaming division? Or to gamers, who will be saddled with a far more expensive platform that faces constant upgrades, cheap and tacky games and little innovation? Or Sony as a whole, for that fact? Sony would be stupid to not do a PSP Phone, but it will try to have the cachet of an Apple device, with proprietary hardware and software. It wouldn't be based on an open source platform like Android.
To me, none of this makes much sense at all.
Chris Winters is an unemployed (and unpublished) novelist and wannabe games writer. You can check out his stream of reviews from his backlog on Been There, Played That (from where this article was reposted), or get in touch with him on Twitter: @akwinters.