The last Sony Product I bought was a PlayStation Portable Slim. It’s not like I hate Sony but I haven’t found any interesting products from them for so long! The two lines that interest me most are phones and gaming consoles. When it comes to Sony phones, the Xperia line looks good on paper but everyone who has used them knows they are just average Android phones. More importantly Sony is one of those companies that believes in forgetting their phones. That was proved by them deciding not to upgrade their Xperia flagship X10 to Froyo. Coming to gaming consoles, Kinect pretty much made sure that I wasn’t gonna buy a PS3 anytime in the future. I’ll stick to my Xbox for at least the next couple of years.
But there is one Sony product that I’ve actually been following for sometime. The PlayStation Phone! The PlayStation Portable was always fun but the iPhone made it so much easier to play games on the go. And my PlayStation got left in the closet. But If I can carry a single device that is my phone and a PlayStation, it’ll be awesome! What’s more awesome is that Sony has planned to base this thing on Android. So it won’t be a closed, proprietary system.
But all that was what I’ve had in my mind for so long. Today I was surprised to see the real phone’s images and videos. It basically looks like a PSP Go loaded with Android. But a PSP Go with much, much better hardware. Here are some leaked specs:
- 4-inch 854×480 Display
- 1 GHz Snapdragon processor
- 512 MB RAM, 512MB ROM
- Qualcomm Adreno 205 Graphics Chip
- 5 Megapixed Camera with LED Flash
While they look like pretty standard Android phone specs, the addition of the Qualcomm GPU arguably makes it what it is intended to be. A full-fledged portable gaming console. The other major make-or-break perspective is the software. While we’ve seen how capable Android is, it’s yet to prove it’s mettle when it comes to gaming. We’ve seen much better games on the iOS platform, both graphically and gameplay-wise. Does Sony have something interesting up their sleeve?
From the leaked videos it looks like PSP will be an app inside the Android phone. I wonder if it’s an emulator to run the entire PSOne/PSX and PSP games. If that’s the case, I’ll be buying the phone the day it launches 🙂 But I think it’s more likely that they are gonna release games under the PlayStation banner and provide special APIs over the Android SDK that makes game development similar to the PSP and also assures that the games will require the specific device.
Here are some leaked photos and videos. To say the least, this is one Sony product that is really really interesting!
