The PlayStation Phone
engadget.com
engadget.com
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I... I think I'm going to cry... I never thought I'd live to see the day Sony gave up on their #*@^ing memory sticks...
i agree with you, however.
Beta, 3.5" floppies, Minidisc, Blu-Ray, Digital8, MS...any others?
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game...
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.
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.
From my experience with the X10 they can't get Android phones right.
I dread to think what the two together will be like.
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.
(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.)
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.
They going with android and SD cards sounds like a good move to me.
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.
PS3 Linux support was retroactively revoked via firmwear update mere months after launch.
millions. boom.
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.
The xbox has demonstrated the opposite.