Sony has trailed in digital music, online video, and casual/social gaming. I'm glad that Sony is trying something different to get ahead of the curve as portable gaming converges with smartphones. There are several reasons, however, why I think this device may struggle in the market.
For instance, who is the target market? Kids and teen gamers who buy a PSP or DS (I assume parents often pay) or young adults that currently buy an Android phone or an iPhone?
If the target market is kids or teen gamers, will they be able to afford the price of the device plus the monthly voice/data plan? For instance, while 33% of teens aspire to own an iPhone, only 14% of teens actually own the device, down 1% from the prior year (Fortune, 2010); perhaps this decline was due to the recession or the emergence of Android phones.
For teens and young adults, will this device appeal to them as a replacement for an iPhone or for a different Android phone? The iPhone and select Android smart phones (e.g., Motorola Droid) have functional value, but also serve as a fashion statement. For many, the phone you choose is an extension of your identity (e.g., like your choice of car). How many teens and young adults will identify with a Sony PS phone with built in PS controls?
Perhaps Sony can overcome the cost of ownership issue by partnering with a discount cellular carrier, such as Virgin Mobile or Metro PCS. The second issue about the appeal of iPhones and select Android phones is more of a challenge. The device as pictured in the Engadget article looks interesting. But how many teens and young adults will shy away from the built in PS controls (and the bulk that this adds to the device)?
What are thoughts on how this device will perform in the smartphone market?
"If the target market is kids or teen gamers, will they be able to afford the price of the device plus the monthly voice/data plan?"
I know plenty of parents who give their kid a PSP+DSi, and/or an iPod Touch, and a "family phone" that may be one of those cheesy sidekick sliders for texting all day.
If parents can ditch all those and give the kid one thing (presumably this PSP phone), it would almost be like making money on the deal.
Do remember that the average age of a gamer is now well into the 30-40 bracket. PSP has sold well to teens, but there's no cut and dried reason why a PSP phone wouldn't sell well to an older demographic.
Targeting someone like Virgin Mobile out the gate would certainly shake things up.
I also can't help but feel that the PSPGo might have been a trial platform for this... if this phone has the guts of a PSPGo and can download PSP games to it, I think it will sell brilliantly. If it has to have new games written for it, it's going to get lost in the 3DS/PSP2 shuffle and just end up with another version of Angry Birds and a couple of iPhone games.
market for this phone will be too small. Idea is not bad, but i'd better think to create additive controller to existing phones, instead of creating whole 2in1 thing.
Perhaps there will be a WiFi-only version for the kids. Although I'm seeing younger and younger children get not just mobile phones but data plans as well.
I think the phone's success depends greatly on how well Sony can leverage its game catalog. Unfortunately Sony has proven fairly incapable of exploiting it on the PS3.
Nintendo is really missing the boat by not making a Nintendo DS Phone. A DS with even the most basic "feature phone" capabilities would be incredibly attractive to the 5 to 35 age group. You know, a dialer, a contact book, basic SMS chat, calculator, calendar, and that Opera browser they already include in the newer models. Throw in a few downloadable DSi apps and it would handily beat the webOS and Windows Phone 7 devices overnight.
WiFi only version already exists - it's called a PSP.
I doubt Nintendo would do that due to their business model - which is to make profit on every hardware unit sold. If they added all those features and had to do deals with carriers etc, I doubt they could make a profit on their hardware.
You make it sound like it would be prohibitively expensive to add a cellular antenna to something. A DSi today costs $150 on which they presumably make a profit.
Cell phones typically cost $200 and come with hundreds in carrier subsidies. If you bought one straight up it would cost $400 to $600. Considering Nintendo makes money on $150, they could increase the cost to $250 to add "all those features" and the DS phone would still be free up front after carrier subsidies.
I'm not sure what business you think cell phones makers are in. They only make money by selling hardware so of course each unit needs to be profitable.
Sony decided a while back to drop memory sticks and use only SD cards moving forward. Even the X10 had an SD card slot. It might have been around the time they announced the X10 now that I think about it, not sure...
This is a Sony-Ericsson product, not a Sony product. I don't know if Sony-Ericsson has ever used Memory Sticks in their products. Certainly non of them have for quite a while.
I find it quite encouraging to see this really. I think one of the flaws of mobile gaming on things like the iPhone is that the touchscreen is a really terrible way of interacting with many control schemes, both because of the lack of tactile response and the fact that your fingers invariably get in the way of the UI.
The fact that it's running Android is a big plus considering Sony's penchant for running with their own tech (either hardware or software) and either noone else adopting it or discouraging from others adopting it.
Touch gaming is great for certain types of games but physical buttons offer a totally different experience. I think a Playstation Phone could have been a big hit if Sony moved quicker. They're just way too late. At best we're going to see some Android games retrofitted with physical button controls and that's just not going to be very exciting. How are they going to convince developers to spend money targeting a non-standard Android platform that will reach so few users? I think the best bet for Sony would be to make Playstation the Android gaming brand. Work with Google to make stock Android the best gaming platform out there, work with handset makers to set some standards for input/GPUs/etc, license the PlayStation brand to Android handset makers, launch a PlayStation Android Store. Let other companies figure out how to get the hardware into people's hands. Does anyone doubt this device will be massively outdated before it even ships?
I think a phone with dedicated gaming buttons / sticks can be successful.
I doubt that we'll see many Android games retrofitted to the PSPhone. What would be the point for developers to do that? It is just limiting the market for your game.
The big push will be developed-from-scratch, PSP and PS2-ported games on the PSPhone. If SE does the emulators and such correctly, the phone will launch with a massive library.
The PSPGo and most recent Nintendo DS series systems were massively outdated when they shipped too. And it didn't stop them from being successful. If you look at the specs for those systems (processor, memory) it is laughable. The PSPhone has a 1GHz processor, 0.5GB RAM and decent 3D rendering performance... so it is going to last a long time, at least 5 years.
The other Android phone makers won't want to have dedicated hardware buttons for gaming... so they won't cooperate with SE, and frankly, SE doesn't want them either. They'd rather be the primary phone gaming platform all by themselves, or failing that, carve out a dedicated chunk of the market.
Funny how we make all this progress and pack a ridiculous amount of processing power in a handheld device, only to then put in a bunch of extra effort just so we can play Super Mario World on yet another device.
With 240 million sales, there's probably a little Mario in each of us. New releases and/or perpetual emulation of Mario games is the one constant we can expect to find in future generations of devices with new and old generations of people alike grabbing coins and jumping on Koopa shells.
Do you think it is going to play games using java like with regular android phones or do you think they will have some other sort of setup? As an android developer this could be very good.
I'd be surprised if they don't have custom graphics hardware, of some sort, in there - I imagine the last thing Sony wants is to commoditise themselves by providing the same hardware platform as normal Android phones.
Even if they don't have custom hardware, I'd be shocked if they didn't have some sort of silicon DRM to stop the software running elsewhere.
It's pretty much the same Qualcomm hardware as every other Android phone (plus the physical controller). I agree that Sony will probably break new ground in Android lockdown.
Only if Sony doesn't do a thing to lock the software up. Maybe they could add SPUs to the phone, or something that would lock the software to the platform.
I agree with you on the X10, but I feel the PSP does some things very well for hardcore gaming. Sure it isn't as populist as the various phone and DS games out there, but I still find the God of War series on the PSP to be one of the most vivid mobile gaming experiences around.
Slapping a Playstation controller on an Android phone is one of those weird last gen/this gen mishmashes that highlights Sony's struggle to cling to relevancy, imo.
Surely the iOS phenomenon (and Android & WP7) -- particularly the iPod touch -- shows that for handheld gaming a chunky controller isn't necessary.
As Gruber often points out, where _is_ the iPod touch competitor? This is likely to be too expensive to compete with the iPod touch, and too chunky/niche to compete with iPhones and other smartphones as a platform in its own right. And that's what Sony needs -- an iOS-like platform, not this strange bit of hardware.
It's pretty sad that for a company that has built some of the most popular consoles of all time, all they can come up with in 2010 is the mutant child of their controller and a generic smartphone.
A controller might not be necessary, but for anyone that plays slightly more involved games than iOS has, it's a godsend. Playing a platformer on an iPod touch is rather annoying.
Some titles have. It doesn't work out as well as you might hope; those inputs aren't exactly precise, and tilting the screen can be a bit disorienting. The result is that level layouts have to be much simpler to maintain the same degree of challenge.
Thanks. I have played the new Super Mario Bros. on the Wii. They make use of shaking and tilting the controller, but very sparingly and buttons are the main means of control.
(It's a good game. I was expecting it would follow the trend of making games ever more casual. I was wrong. Mario Bros. Wii is hard.)
A chunky controller isn't necessary for handheld gaming... but we need something better than a flat touchscreen too.
Especially if you're going to play a FPS, you need two analog sticks, and dedicated buttons that you can feel without having to look at. You don't get that with a flat touchscreen.
The PSPhone doesn't have actual analog sticks, it looks like it has a capacitive multi-touch surface. The key thing that makes it all better is that it has two little nubs so that you can feel where the center position is. This is such an important piece of feedback you can't get with a flat screen.
I also don't like giving up some of the screen real estate as controller surface either, but that's me.
Interesting arena for the Android to get to venture into. Makes sense, really... Just another means to get the OS out there... With Android phones and tablet/netbooks appearing everywhere, it is neat to see the Android platform showing up in yet another sector of the electronics market - gaming platforms. Nothing new for Java, granted, but still a hell of a feat in such a "short time" operating under the Android/Google brand. Seems like the market for Android devs is growing by leaps and bounds... Before long there will be a Android powered portable bluetooth/HDMI/netbookish portable-game-consoles appearing in the market - running Android, of course...
I am puzzled as to why the choice of Android was made (assuming it's true). A company with Sony's background would seem to have the requisite OS experience, and one would they would have learned from the recent lessons of why control over your OS is a good thing.
Not really, it's a well known factoid that their not-invented-here syndrome is pretty much the reason why the iPod is the leader of portable music players and not the WalkMan.
They going with android and SD cards sounds like a good move to me.
1) Sony uses open source, they do like it. PS2 and PS3 could run Linux.
2) Sony-Ericsson already makes the Xperia line of Android phones. The Playstation phone is the same thing, with buttons.
3) Sony has another strategic partnership with Google Android in its new line of Google TV enabled televisions and Blu-ray players.
Sony may not meet your standards for always being in the spirit of open source. But they do use a lot of open source and have shown a heck of a lot more support for open source and open standards than other device companies.
Besides. Compared to the rest of the Android OS field, Sony fits right in. Take what you can get for free and don't give back any more than necessary.
PS2 Linux support was a massive joke -- they forced linux development to be perfectly orthogonal to the rest of the system, and I don't think anything that separates the PS2 from the typical desktop made it into open source (i.e., GPU drivers, and so on).
PS3 Linux support was retroactively revoked via firmwear update mere months after launch.
Datapoint re 1): the Sony Reader line is built on Linux. Not particularly open, though, since you can't modify anything. (There was some hacking done on the 500 and 505, but later models lack the firmware updater.)
Oh god, the horror. Somehow they've managed to make something that looks worse and less intuitive than a PSP Go, a handheld console that managed to take everything right about the PSP and completely screw it up.
Very interesting approach to analog sticks. Looks like two circular touch pads with a button in the middle. One of the problems with touch screens is that you can't feel the center of virtual control sticks.
problem with onscreen keys is not only "you can not feel" issue, but simply with blocking part of the screen with your finger. For most of application it is not critical, but for gaming it is.
Why hasn't anyone built a 3rd party controller that talks via bluetooth to any android/iOS device? Make a few games and license the API and phone specific cradle-to-controller grips.
Hopefully the Playstation team is able to finally give a good skin to Android.
I would say I have faith in Sony making buckets of money selling emulated Playstation games, but the PS3 Store has been a disaster. They had every opportunity to have an App Store before there was an App Store, but they blew it. And still continue to blow it.
I believe the phone is made by Sony Ericsson and not Sony Computer Entertainment. It looks like it just had the PlayStation name slapped on a phone with a D-Pad.
I just wonder why they put out that joke of a controller for Google TV, when they could have made a PS Move-like controller with a slide-out keyboard or similar.
It's a trap! They will advertise that you can use it as a phone and a gaming device... but then they will claim that people might badmouth sony or something using the phone feature, and they will make you choose... phone or psp.
For instance, who is the target market? Kids and teen gamers who buy a PSP or DS (I assume parents often pay) or young adults that currently buy an Android phone or an iPhone?
If the target market is kids or teen gamers, will they be able to afford the price of the device plus the monthly voice/data plan? For instance, while 33% of teens aspire to own an iPhone, only 14% of teens actually own the device, down 1% from the prior year (Fortune, 2010); perhaps this decline was due to the recession or the emergence of Android phones.
For teens and young adults, will this device appeal to them as a replacement for an iPhone or for a different Android phone? The iPhone and select Android smart phones (e.g., Motorola Droid) have functional value, but also serve as a fashion statement. For many, the phone you choose is an extension of your identity (e.g., like your choice of car). How many teens and young adults will identify with a Sony PS phone with built in PS controls?
Perhaps Sony can overcome the cost of ownership issue by partnering with a discount cellular carrier, such as Virgin Mobile or Metro PCS. The second issue about the appeal of iPhones and select Android phones is more of a challenge. The device as pictured in the Engadget article looks interesting. But how many teens and young adults will shy away from the built in PS controls (and the bulk that this adds to the device)?
What are thoughts on how this device will perform in the smartphone market?