Sony uber-gizmo in pipeline

Sony uber-gizmo in pipeline

Clutching at straws or long-term vision

THE RUMOUR MILL is in overdrive about a combined Sony Playstation-smartphone-netboook-e-reader über-gizmo.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Sony might be working on a smartphone to compete with Apple on a level beyond its current and flagging Sony Erricson portfolio.

Sourced who talked to the WSJ suggest the kit could be out this year and will be the driver for Sony's turnaround.

Sony has taken an absolute battering at nearly every turn in its line up of products. The PS3 has faired quite well due to good exclusive titles this year but the PSPgo and its phones have not been very successful. It has also bombed in the music market and not managed to capitalise on its Walkman brand with a services infrastructure to rival Apple's, but then who has?

The leaks state that Sony is going to to hook all of its gadgets up to a central online service to power its disparate range of entertainment devices as a single multi-media whole. This makes sense given Sony's CEO, Howard Stringer has said that the Playstation Network is Sony's "not-so-secret weapon."

If Sony does intend to use its Playstation Network as a central online service for punters to access multi-media content, let's hope it fixes the hardware versus software confusion that killed PS3's earlier this week. µ

Fri 05 Mar 2010, 17:51

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Comments

Xperia

shame they didn't think of this earlier, they could have based this uber phone on the Xperia X10 by writing an app for it that ties it into the playstation network.... 850x480 sceen and 1gig processor would make it hard to beat in that respect.

posted by : Franki Hauptle, 08 March 2010 Complain about this comment

Pointless?

"Sony might be working on a smartphone to compete with Apple on a level beyond its current and flagging Sony Erricson portfolio."

Why would they bother trying with smartphones? Crackberries have that one sealed up. SE do make some of the better multimedia phones that annihilate junk like the Iphone. It seems pointless to ignore this market in favour of smartphones.

Also @Andydread - uber-proprietary and uber-DRM-infected? Sony has been bad at times, but compared to Apple they are positively saintly.

posted by : Jester, 07 March 2010 Complain about this comment

Sony? No thanks.

Sony? Anything from them is sure to be uber-proprietary and uber-DRM-infected. Not to mention they uber-lobby and uber-pay the congerss critters here in the US for more draconian copyright laws.
Sony? No thanks.
When they quit their draconian and proprietary ways and leave the content business then we will consider recommending them to our customers again. Not before.

posted by : Andydread, 06 March 2010 Complain about this comment

Progress?

To be fair to Sony, they have been having a rough time of late. However if they want to roll out this uber device, they really need to focus on improving the infrastructure that powers the Playstation network.
At the moment it's download speeds are relatively slow compared to other services which are available (xbox Live and itunes are the main ones I'm thinking of). I do think that with the right design and execution, Sony Entertainment Network services (surely they can't roll out the Playstation brand onto EVERYTHING) could be a winner, however it will fall down if content delivery speed isn't drastically improved to be as good or better than it's competitors.

posted by : RattyocasteR, 06 March 2010 Complain about this comment