During an interview, Sony Ericsson CEO Bert Nordberg said, “There’s a lot of smoke, and I tell you there must be a fire somewhere,” regarding a PlayStation Phone. Sony has an extremely strong offering in the gaming market, and that’s very interesting.”
The existence of the mythical PlayStation Phone has been a rumor for many years now, though pictures of a possible prototype released into the wild a few weeks ago, along with potential specs for the device. Pictures of a PSP2 prototype also found their way into the wild last week, so it seems Sony is either hard at work attempting to dominate the portable market, or it’s just that time of year when pictures of fake prototypes begin floating around the Internet.
If both devices are real, one has to wonder why Sony wouldn’t attempt to combine the PSP2 and the PS Phone, rather than possibly confuse and splinter the market with two similar devices, one being a phone that plays somewhat sophisticated games, and the other being a gaming handheld that plays very sophisticated games, but doesn’t have any other important features.
In theory, the only real reason to own both would be if the PSP2’s games are much, much more sophisticated than the PS Phone’s games, but even then, people would undoubtedly wonder why Sony didn’t just shove phone capabilities into the PSP2 with a completely optional carrier plan. Sony already attempted something like this idea once before when they stuck a DVD player into their PlayStation 2–gamers who owned a PlayStation 2 didn’t have to buy or watch DVDs, but the option was there, and proved very successful.
(via The Wall Street Journal)
