Yeah, we’ve been hearing about a Sony PSP phone since forever, but Engadget now swears that it’s going to be a reality, years after it should have been. According to rumors, the device is said to look like a mashup of the Samsung Captivate and Sony’s PSPgo. They say it will have a a slide-out controller (similar to the mock-up Engadget put together above) where slide-out phones usually place the keyboard. The PSP’s analog nub would be replaced by some sort of trackpad for analog controls.
Here’s what we can tell you about the hardware: if you’re a gaming fan, this is exactly the kind of phone you’ve been waiting for. The device is described as cross between the Samsung Captivate and the PSP Go — in other words, it’s a landscape slider with game controls in place of the typical QWERTY keyboard. The D-pad is here, but instead of the small joystick, the device will have what was described as a “long touch pad” for analog controls, along with standard PSP buttons and shoulder buttons. The phone has a large display, described as being between 3.7 and 4.1 inches with WVGA or better resolution, a 5 megapixel camera that we’re told might not be final, and it’ll likely have a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU on board. The phone is mostly black with some silver highlights, and the gamepad area is white / silver in color. Apparently it’s currently branded as a Xperia device, but it looks like it will carry PlayStation branding as well. Those who’ve seen the phone say it looks “pretty damn sexy.” The mockup above probably doesn’t do the actual hardware justice, but it should give you an idea of what you’ll be dealing with.
On the software side, it looks like the device will be running Gingerbread (Android 3.0) with a phone-specific skin, and there will be a new area of the Android Market specifically for the games. That content will be initially accessible only by the halo device, but from the sounds of things, these titles might be made available to other Android phones if their specs and button layouts meet requirements. Games will be graphically in the range of PSX or PSP games, meaning true 3D gaming is headed to Android. Titles currently being shown off seem to be focused around some older PSX as well as new PSP offerings, with God of War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and LittleBigPlanet possibly on tap, and future plans for titles which incorporate augmented reality features.
The rumors state that the phone could be introduced as soon as October, but this isn’t confirmed. Honestly, Sony, the company with its tentacles in every single corner of the consumer electronics market should have done this years ago, before Apple— a company that several years ago was neither in the phone or the handheld gaming market and now dominating both— came along and kicked everyone’s ass.
It’s like if Wendy’s were to come up with a double cheesy beef chalupa that rocked everybody’s world and then five years later, Taco Bell woke up and realized they could have made one out of stuff they already had.
