Avert your eyes, Sony employees, because someone outed your PlayStation Phone before you had a chance to.
Or did they? Did Engadget jump the gun? Have they unwittingly made some jokester famous?
Late last night some rabble-rouser slipped Engadget a batch of photos of a gizmo that looks suspiciously like a PSP Go (or, if you will, Sony’s discontinued Mylo communicator). So much so, it might as well be a PSP Go, just with the Sony Ericsson logo at one end of the slide-out touchscreen, and four raised, slightly curving phone-functionality buttons framing the other.
After applying the usual grueling tenets of contemporary journalistic skepticism, i.e. “Hey, someone posted a bunch of non-blurry pics!” Engadget pronounced it the real deal.
What do we know (or at least think we do) about the purported device?
It’ll run Android 3.0. We picked up on Engadget’s original scoop in August, when the tech blog claimed the phone would run “Gingerbread,” codename for Android 3.0, Google’s mobile Linux/GNU platform and rumored to be out any time now.
Come one, come all, to Sony Marketplace! No surprises here. The PSP Go interacts with Sony’s PlayStation Store if you want to download apps or games. You’ll either have the option to connect to that, or an agnostic version everyone’s calling Sony Marketplace, probably designed to head-to-head with Apple’s App Store.
It’ll pack a 1GHz Qualcomm processor. Engadget suggested in August, wrongly it seems, that the phone would use a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. Now they’re saying it’ll be the 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655, architecturally similar to the T-Mobile G2’s 800MHz MSM7230, but with a 200MHz speed bump.
It’ll have 512MB of RAM and 1GB of ROM. Pick your jaw up off the floor–or let it drop, if you didn’t know the latest iterations of the PSP (both the standard 3000 and Go) only have 64MB RAM.
The screen’s between 3.7 to 4.1 inches, diagonally. As predicted back in August. Note that by comparison, the PSP Go, which employs a smaller screen than the standard PSP 3000, has a 3.8 inch screen. We don’t know screen resolution, but speculation in August pegged it as WVGA (or better), meaning upwards of 800-by-480 lines of resolution. Contrast with the PSP Go’s 480-by-272.
It won’t have an analog joystick. Ouch, is all I can say as someone long clamoring for a second thumbstick on the PSP. Instead, you’ll have to make do with a horizontally hockey-rink-shaped touchpad. Ever played Mario 64 for the Nintendo DS? Rubbed your thumb on touchpad in lieu of a joystick to move Mario around? Think that, along with shoulder buttons, a d-pad on the left, and and the standard Sony geometry-symboled button pad on the right.
Goodbye Memory Stick, hello microSD slot. That’s what the snaps submitted to Engadget suggest, anyway.
And, most importantly, it might be a great big stinking fake. As we noted earlier this morning, NowGamer thinks the images are mock-ups and Engadget’s been hoodwinked, observing “telltale signs” like “a large amount of dirt collecting around the screen” as well as “A” and “B” buttons (in lieu of Sony’s trademark symbols) displayed in a screenshot of the interface. On the other hand, Eurogamer reported–it seems inaccurately–that Sony had outright claimed the images were “definitely fake.” They then, bizarrely, sourced the NowGamer story, which only has Sony saying “we do not comment on rumor and speculation.” Update: It seems a Sony spokesperson had, in fact, told NowGamer the images were fakes, then asked NowGamer to pull and redact with their “no comment” angle.
In summary, much ado about who-knows-what, but if these images do turn out to be phonies, thanks for dragging me out of bed early for nothing, Engadget.
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