RUMOR MILL: PSP Phone in Works?

Scribbled on June 29th, 2009 by Jordan Lund
Filed in Mobile Gaming, Rumor Mill, Sony PSP

Oh boy, here we go again. The rumor machine is rife with news of an impending PSP phone from Sony and Sony Ericsson, this time a report out of Nikkei that got picked up by Reuters.

“Sony plans to set up a project team as early as July to develop a new product that combines functions of its portable game player and Sony Ericsson’s mobile phones, the Nikkei said.”

I have more than a few problems with this rumor, first and foremost being that it was far more credible two years ago when there were leaked patent sketches. Nothing came of it then. Not only is this particular news two years old, the images from the patent filing go all the way back to 2005. If Sony were going to act on it at all, it would seem that that particular boat has already sailed.

Problem number two with this rumor is that even according to the source there is no product yet, merely a hypothetical project team which may or may not be meeting as early as next month. This does explain why Sony didn’t announce anything at E3 – there was nothing to announce. But since there’s no actual physical product, it seems premature to be talking about it, unlike the leaked PS3 Slim and PSP Go! photos.

Lastly, while I think it would be great to have a cell phone capable of accessing the PSP library, the jury is still out on digital downloads. It’s not known at this time if the PSP Go! will be a hit or not (and at $250 the odds seem stacked against it) and that’s going to determine the viability of PSP digital downloads. This, of course, may be the purpose of that “project team” mentioned earlier, to observe the PSP Go! and see if a cell phone iteration is do-able or not. It simply doesn’t make sense to further segment a market when you don’t know if your just announced market segmentation is going to succeed or fail.

In the end though, I think this is just the latest percolation in a rumor that has been brewing for four years. I think it would be far more likely to see a PSP2 and PSP2 Phone (not unlike the iPod Touch and iPhone) rather than shoe-horning it into the current models.

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