At the beginning of August, tech blog Engadget ran a full report outlining the specs of a long-rumored, always-denied PlayStation smartphone from Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC). The new Playstation phone would serve two purposes for the company. It would be a second attempt to conquer Nintendo (PINK: NTDOY) in the portable video games market just as they release their new Nintendo 3DS handheld. It would also serve as an effort to steal away smartphone market share from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: APPL), whose iPhone line continues to dominate and is a competitor in the games space itself.
The Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone would have a little help from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) as well, thanks to the inclusion of that company’s mobile operating system, Android. Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Ericsson both declined to comment on the veracity of the report, but Engadget has spotted some new information that indicates the new Playstation phone is all too real.
A new job listing with Sony’s Playstation division is calling for a London-based senior server engineer with “experience in mobile development, specifically Android” as well as with “cloud hosting, such as Amazon Web Services.” These required skills definitely point to Sony developing an online game service for a new smartphone. Now is the time for Sony to enter the market as well. With Apple’s recently launched Game Center gaming network for iOS devices like the iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone and with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) preparing to release the Windows Phone 7 with Xbox Live integration, it’s imperative that Sony creates a clear strategy that brings their Playstation Network online gaming service into the smartphone realm to compete. The Playstation Portable, now five years old and still relatively expensive for a devoted gaming handheld, is also a dying piece of technology in every market except Japan. The PSP held its own against the Nintendo DS at the end of last decade, but its software sales have been decimated by widespread piracy, making the game a poor source of revenue for both Sony and game publishers like Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ: ATVI) and Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS). A new generation of PSP tech doubling as a smartphone could energize Sony’s place in the portable games market, the Playstation Network’s online gaming audience, and Sony Ericsson’s fortunes in the smartphone space.
Sony Computer Entertainment has been denying the existence of a Playstation smartphone for years now. Rumors began popping up almost immediately after the Playstation Portable’s April 2005 launch. Then co-COO of Sony Computer Entertainment Jim Ryan indicated in 2007 that a Playstation and Sony Ericsson phone would make sense for the company and the company’s own magazine said a “PSP-style phone” was in development in 2008. The new handheld, described by Engadget in August, would be a gaming-focused device that would be a physical hybrid of Sony’s PSPGo—the 2009 model of Playstation Portable without a drive for Sony’s proprietary UMD media format—and Samsung’s Captivate smartphone. It would be approximately 4-inches long, have a 5-megapixel camera, and support both touch controls and traditional game pad controls. Instead of having a QWERTY keyboard that slides out from under the touch screen, the Playstation phone would have a slide out button array similar to the PSP’s with eight-button cross configurations on the ends of the device as well as buttons on the left and right horizontal shoulders.
As of this writing, Anthony Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
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