Rumour: Is the Sony PlayStation phone finally happening?

At the moment, it’s hard to argue mobile phone gaming on anything other than the iPhone, but that may change if Sony’s new idea comes to fruition.

The concept Sony is introducing merges the PlayStation Portable with an Android phone, an idea that makes a lot of sense. We’ve heard about a “PlayStation Phone” for a while now, but this is the first time where any real details have been suggest

Sony’s idea is roughly this: take a Sony Ericsson phone, add video game controls, and then let users buy their PlayStation games from the Android market.
From a design point of view, this makes the PlayStation Phone very similar to the PlayStation Portable Go. The Go was the most recent incarnation of the PSP and had users ditch the UMD cartridge system and switch to downloadable games that made use of the system’s flash memory. Unlike other PSP models before it, the Go also featured a slide out controller pad.
Both of these ideas – downloadable titles and a sliding controller pad – are consistent with this new PlayStation Phone concept. In fact, the device we’re hearing about is very similar to the Samsung Galaxy S with what’s under the hood: 1GHz processor, 5 megapixel camera, and a large screen size likely accommodating around 4 inches.
Interestingly, it’s expected that Sony won’t be locking games to the specific PlayStation-branded phones, a move that could help sell Android as a gaming platform. With titles such as Little Big Planet and Gran Turismo already existing on the PSP, we can only imagine that these could be ported to the Android-PlayStation platform.
We contacted Sony Computer Entertainment Australia and were told “PlayStation does not comment on rumour and speculation,” but with Apple’s iPhone currently dominating the mobile phone gaming space at the moment, this could be the very thing PlayStation needs to take back some of the mobile gaming sector.