Xperia X10 Blog

Sony Ericsson prepping Playstation/Xperia branded phone running Android Gingerbread?

Sony Ericsson prepping PSP branded phone running Android GingerbreadPark this firmly in the rumour category for now, but Engadget has it on good word that Sony Ericsson is currently developing a brand new Playstation/PSP-branded smartphone rocking Android Gingerbread. This handset could launch as early as October this year.

The handset will be Xperia branded and come in black with silver highlights (sounds very similar to the X10). Imagine the Xperia X10 with a slide-out gaming pad (like that on the PSP Go) and you have a good idea of what to expect. It will have a d-pad, a “long touch pad” for analogue controls as well as the standard PSP buttons and shoulder buttons. The gamepad area will be white & silver in colour.

In terms of hard specifications, the phone is believed to run a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (much like the Xperia X10) and comes with a 3.7-inch to 4.1-inch WVGA screen and 5MP camera.

This is a huge undertaking by Sony Ericsson and Google and it seems that there will be a specific area in the Android Market to house these higher-calibre games, akin to the quality of current PSP games. Only this device would have access to these games or other hardware that meets the spec and button layout requirements.

I’m somehow finding it difficult to see something like this being pushed through as early as October. Sony Ericsson is not expected to deliver Android 2.1 (Éclair) to its flagship handset until the end of Q3, yet this new Xperia PSP could be landing in October with Android Gingerbread! However, it seems that Google has as much invested interest in seeing this succeed as SE does, especially given the perception that the higher quality games still exist on Apple’s platform. Therefore, if Google wants to make a statement when it launches Android Gingerbread, nothing says it better than a Playstation branded smartphone.

Via Engadget.

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23 responses to “Sony Ericsson prepping Playstation/Xperia branded phone running Android Gingerbread?”

  4. FFS! Sort out the X10 first off. At least we know what all the devs have been doing.

    Can anyone say nokia ngage?

  6. Not likely. It would be rooted in no time and it would kill the console like piracy killed the actual PSP.

  10. @Andy: I’m with you on this. SE should get their crap together regarding the X10 line before running off into a completely new direction with something like this. The X10 needs FroYo… not Eclair, and it shouldn’t be taking SE 6 months from the hardware’s release to get that (as 2.1 is).

    If they can’t manage to port UX to FroYo in a logical amount of time, how long will updates take for a phone running a gaming console on top?

  12. SE needs to get the following items on the X10

    Remote Play
    Flash
    Netflix
    Current Android Version

    SE starts the race but cannot finish. We all know it’s not how you start, but how you finish. I beleive the X10 has great potential but SE need to get the right people in place to listen to their consumers and make it happen.

  13. SONY is starting to really piss me and alot of ppl off that have purchased the x10. wow so they took our money and put all the time that they had on something totally different. leaving all the x10 users kicked to the curb with one lousy update nice work guys its one hell of a way to get rid of your loyal consumers.

  15. PLEASE get X10 the update first then only concentrate on this. X10 still running on 1.6 and now u talking bout 3.0? bullshit~!

  17. A PSP based mobile phone will definitely give Sony an advantage but for it to happen they do not need Android based OS.

    For Xperia users like me a simple update to allow multi touch feature to play arcade games would be enough :p

  18. from what i’ve read, there will be no multi touch…

    Hardware limitation…. meh! for the x10 i mean

  20. wow they could totally have a market winner if they marketed it with a psp/ps1/ maybe even ps2 emulator built in and free the legacy games (atleast a some of them that sony have rights to) free to download along side paid apps and games. they have a huge library to back them up already and gamers after an all in one phone would love to get free/cheap legacy games as well as paying for new ones.

  21. What an awful mock-up – it’s missing most of the PSP keys! Sony may well release the PSP as a smartphone, but it wouldn’t be Android-based because it’d be unnecessarily difficult to implement, and it’d be almost impossible to make it piracy-proof. Remember how they stripped Linux out of the PS3? They’re hardly going to let it happen again.