It looks like the oft-rumored PlayStation Phone is a reality after all, if a new video from Engadget is to be believed (which it is). For all those references Nintendo made of the DS becoming a “converged” device that let owners check-in to their airplane flights online, among other things, Sony clearly has the upper hand when it comes to phone hardware.
The unofficial unveiling of the PlayStation Phone makes total sense, as does the product itself. Sony PlayStation, Sony Ericsson … we all knew something incestuous was going to happen at some point, and the timing — just over a month before CES, is enough to make people drool at the prospect of an official unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show. Presuming the PlayStation Phone will make an appearance at CES, that is. There’s no guarantee that it will, but that would be a fantastic place to debut it, with a follow-up hands-on at E3 2011.
The PlayStation Phone, currently code-named Zeus Z1, probably won’t ship with the name “PlayStation Phone.” But, until Sony (either “Ericsson” or “Computer Entertainment of America”) announces otherwise, we’ll just have to call us that and ask for your forgiveness. As shown in the video below, the device is a slider phone but has traditional game controls below the screen rather than a QWERTY keyboard. A D-Pad and the four PlayStation face buttons are obvious, and the touchpad in the center could very well function like two thumbsticks. Unfortunately, it’s not clear from this video whether that’s the case, so we’ll have to let our imagination run wild.
It’s also not clear how games would be installed on the device, although it would presumably be via the included PlayStation app, the icon for which you can see in the video. Logic would dictate that a PlayStation app would function similarly to the PlayStation Store and be easily accessible from the phone’s Android version 2.3 OS, code-named “Gingerbread.” That’s pure speculation, though. What isn’t speculation is that the inordinately thick device is alive and kicking, with its official unveiling not likely to be far away.
We’ll have more information about the PlayStation Phone — or whatever it’s ultimately called — as it becomes available.