Engadget has photos of a prototype Sony Ericsson slide-out phone with Playstation/PSP-style gaming controls. The phone has a multitouch track pad (hard to slide analog sticks beneath a screen) and purportedly will appear sometime next year with Android 3.0, aka
Rumors of an Android 3 PlayStation Phone first emerged in August. But we’ve been down this road many times before, with devices reported to be imminent, then killed off.
According to Engadget, the phone’s screen is “in the range of 3.7 to 4.1 inches” — they have photos, but not a copy of the phone itself, so there’s some guesswork involved. The phone is also reported to have a 1GHz Qualcomm processor, 512MB of RAM and 1GB of ROM.
That’s not much storage if the phone’s going to store games, pictures, video, books, apps or other media. Apparently the phone takes a microSD cards but not memory sticks or UMD. That’s one way to solve the storage problem, albeit a cumbersome one.
Engadget also claims there will be a special Sony Marketplace offering Android apps for the device. Custom Android app stores for custom Android devices seem to be the thing to do: Barnes & Noble’s getting ready to do just that for its new Nook Color.
Earlier this week, Kotaku reported that Sony executives were showing off a slide-out widescreen gaming device that the company was calling the PSP2. This summer, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sony was working on adding 3G networking to its gaming devices, and on handheld devices offering wireless communication, gaming and e-reading.
Assuming all of these projects are active, they could be complimentary devices, offering slightly different features and price points, or it could be a single convergent device offering everything. I guess we’ll find out sometime in 2011.
See Also:
- Rumor: Sony Ericsson Plans Android 3 PlayStation Phone
- Sony Ericsson: Playstation Phone Coming For Christmas
- Sony: PlayStation Phone A 'Seductive' Possibility
- Report: Sony Killed PlayStation Phone
- PSP's Digital Comic Reader Quirky, But Enjoyable
- Wired 13.02: PLAY
- Is Android Open?
- Amazon to Launch Android App Store
- Everything We Know So Far About Amazon's Android App Store …
- Independent App Stores Take On Google's Android Market