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Sony Designing Mobile Phone/PSP Hybrid to Better Compete Against iPhone?

With products like the Palm Pre, Apple has to take care it does not just make the iphone for "fanboys" rich enough to own one. Nokia Sony RIM etc. can do "me to" products that do everything that the iphone will and more, for less. In the end features will sell the handset, rather that the ergonomics, ease of use, surprise and delight that are only discoverable in everyday use. When did you last see an iphone for demo in-store? Apple needs to think about its phone line up if it wants to sell outside it happy band of evangelists.
What i am really saying is
DROP THE PRICE!
 
dagamer34 said:
The greatest weakness of the iPhone is the lack of buttons for gaming. As great as the touchscreen is, you need a D-pad + 2 buttons to get quality controls. The lack of feedback makes most games frustrating to me, particually the ones that try to be more traditional.
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I agree broadly, but have you seen a kid playing on an iPod Touch? It's frightening how quickly they adjust and learn. Plus games on the App Store are cheap if not free.

Add to that the other features (web, email, peer to peer, iTunes, movies, etc) and you have a very compelling product that's competing very well as a handheld games console.
 
Eidorian said:
Just "good enough" leads to quite a few purchases that aren't fulfilling.

Sony has been dipping into this device market with PSP, mylo, and their reader. They need to shell out one product. The PSP Go does look like a change over the original. There's potential but I'll wait for something to be released first.
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I get what you are saying but the iPhone is good enough at so many things, that it makes me regret buying other things. My DS is better at portable gaming than the iPhone. Bit I don't use it anymore because my phone is always with me, and it's good enough.
 
If they do come up with something, you can bet it will have a completely different storage method than anything else currently available :) And, it will probably contain moving parts :rolleyes: Hopefully they will fit a minidisc player so I can play all those old discs, currently collecting dust next to my cassettes!
 
grapefruitx said:
With products like the Palm Pre, Apple has to take care it does not just make the iphone for "fanboys" rich enough to own one. Nokia Sony RIM etc. can do "me to" products that do everything that the iphone will and more, for less. In the end features will sell the handset, rather that the ergonomics, ease of use, surprise and delight that are only discoverable in everyday use. When did you last see an iphone for demo in-store? Apple needs to think about its phone line up if it wants to sell outside it happy band of evangelists.
What i am really saying is
DROP THE PRICE!
Click to expand...

what?

An iPhone 3G can be had subsidized with a contract in the U.S. for $99. I doubt there are many other 3G network phones with ATT that can be had for less than that price subsidized.

The service plans are another thing, but I have a feeling those are all equal across that class of mobile phone.

Also, by all accounts Apple is selling iPhone to large numbers of people outside of the so-called "happy band of evangelists."
 
There are so many points being missed here and there are so many people dismissing Sony as if it's some tadpole competitor.

Sony sells WAY more phones than Apple. According to Reuters, even in a bad quarter they are selling 14m units.

The "phone" part of iPhone has been poor from day one. Lack of MMS, dropped calls, no standardised ringtone support, poor voice quality, horribly positioned microphone etc.

Professional video game developers are jumping on iPhone because it is extremely cheap and easy to develop for in comparison to other platforms. But this leads to poor quality software, because they aren't willing to dedicate the same resources to the development.

I'm yet to find a game on the App Store which comes anywhere close to being comparable to a PSP game.

PSP is also a far superior video playback device because it has a 16:9 screen. Apple continually ********s its customers by claiming that iPhone and iPod touch are "widescreen", yet with any 16:9 content you'll be seeing black bars or having to do a crop.

jb1280 said:
An iPhone 3G can be had subsidized with a contract in the U.S. for $99. I doubt there are many other 3G network phones with ATT that can be had for less than that price subsidized.
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Whoops, yet another American blinded by their borders. Sony is a Japanese company. iPhone isn't doing much in Japan, and it is also vastly overpriced in many countries around the world. Can I interest you in an iPhone 3GS 8GB for £725 from the UK's carrier, O2?

str1f3 said:
The PS3 is hard to develop for and Microsoft has taken Apple's all-in-one solution and applied it to gaming.
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Whoops, it was Microsoft that pioneered the ultra low cost, all in one development environment for independent developers and end users. They called it XNA and it came along a long time before anyone had even whispered "App Store".
 
Hope they produce a good phone, to make Apple step up their game. I hope that their smartphone shall not go the way of Sony GPS systems, which were dismal to say the least.

See how the release of the PalmPre brings out new features in the iPhone. A good Sony smartphone might just bring in all the features we have so badly craved for in the iPhone!

Competition is a very good thing!
 
neiltc13 said:
Whoops, yet another American blinded by their borders. Sony is a Japanese company. iPhone isn't doing much in Japan, and it is also vastly overpriced in many countries around the world. Can I interest you in an iPhone 3GS 8GB for £725 from the UK's carrier, O2?
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Stop spreading bullsh*t. There's no such thing as a 8GB iPhone 3GS and the most expensive is the 32GB one on payg which is £538.30....

It really pisses me off when people spread misinformation.

M. :mad:
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

I really think the PSP is in a different catagory than the iPhone. It may compete a bit on the cell phone side of things if Sony releases a PSP with the capabilities but I don't think that it will appeal to the same audience as the iPhone so for direct competition it will be a flop. We shall see.
 
Well I like new technology, so hopefully Sony brings something exciting to the table.

It's important for Apple fans to remember that competition is essential - it's not a bad thing. Do we want to see Apple become the next 90's-era Microsoft?
 
Mobile gaming is unique in that games have to be short, simple and fun to take off. Horsepower is a low priority. I've had more fun playing Snake on my monochrome Nokia than I have on my PSP.

That said, Sony can't seem to do anything right these days:
- VAIO P: Fantastic in every way except the price
- VAIO UX: Fantastic concept, great design, bad price
- PSP GO: No second analogue stick, no more power (boosting the system to allow in-game XMB and background downloading would be nice), WAY overpriced.
- PS3: Price still too high. Publishers threatening to dump it.
- XPERIA X1
- Sony Ericsson: Sales down 50%, needs to raise cash to stay afloat

I haven't seen a really good Sony product in a while. Although I'd buy a VAIO P like that >click< if I had the dough.
 
I'm not sure how Sony is going to compete against this...

First they need to develop an Operating System... With SDK support... an app store.... tons and tons of application.... multi-touch... media support and all that stuff... Starting with a browser...

iphie.png
 
grapefruitx said:
With products like the Palm Pre, Apple has to take care it does not just make the iphone for "fanboys" rich enough to own one. Nokia Sony RIM etc. can do "me to" products that do everything that the iphone will and more, for less. In the end features will sell the handset, rather that the ergonomics, ease of use, surprise and delight that are only discoverable in everyday use. When did you last see an iphone for demo in-store? Apple needs to think about its phone line up if it wants to sell outside it happy band of evangelists.
What i am really saying is
DROP THE PRICE!
Click to expand...

You are pretty much wrong on all fronts.

And AT&T/Apple did drop the price. $99 for the iPhone 3G is a terrific price for a device of its caliber!
 
Nothing much wrong with Sony Ericsson phones.

I'd pick one over a Nokia every day.

Sony as a company clearly has talented staff, it just probably needs a bit more direction. Or quite a lot more.

I would never underestimate them or write them off like some of the posters on here have.
 
DELLsFan said:
A shame. I spent hours playing Wing Commander II on one of those C64s! Great fun in those days!
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Wow - that must've been a hell of a C64.

Nevermind, but Wing Commander was one of the first games to really use up VGA gfx. So no chance playing that on a 16 colors C64.

I personally thought, it sucked btw.
 
Sony would be best to just license a psp emulator for the iPhone and be done with it. The games would sell themselves and they would make $$$.
 
Pika said:
I'm not sure how Sony is going to compete against this...

First they need to develop an Operating System... With SDK support... an app store.... tons and tons of application.... multi-touch... media support and all that stuff... Starting with a browser...
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They can just use Android or Windows Mobile.
 
blackpond said:
I'm sure I saw this discussed elsewhere, but - the 3GS offers an API allowing communication with devices attached to the dock port.... it won't be long. :)
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It's not the iPhone 3GS that offers it, it's iPhone OS 3.0. Therefore ALL of the existing iPhone and iPod Touch devices could easily get some sort of "cradle" with buttons (and strongly resemble the PSP ironically :)

A group was already working on one for jailbroken phones http://www.icontrolpad.com/ , but now that Apple is officially allowing things like this i think we're only months away from seeing something from Belkin or somebody where the phone just snaps into a cradle. I would like to see something like this with an integrated battery. That way you could lock your iphone into it wherever and game for a while without worrying about draining your main battery for a while...

The only issue would be for there to be unified support for all of these devices that come out, that way game developers would only have to worry about supporting 1 or 2 types of these things...
 
ok

Yeah good luck with that Sony, we all know they put the crappiest hardware parts inside all of their products.

Yet again another company tries to make something Apple have perfected. It's not going to work Sony. I guess we'll have to wait to see if there's any flaws kinks or F ups in the up coming gamer cell phone.

But I guess it could be interesting but that's about it, I probably won't buy it anyhow. :rolleyes:

LOL even MJ thinks so. http://www.sony-sucks.com/
 
neiltc13 said:
There are so many points being missed here and there are so many people dismissing Sony as if it's some tadpole competitor.

(---snip---)
PSP is also a far superior video playback device because it has a 16:9 screen. Apple continually ********s its customers by claiming that iPhone and iPod touch are "widescreen", yet with any 16:9 content you'll be seeing black bars or having to do a crop.
Click to expand...

Ok i see where you're going with this, but that point is a little silly IMO. Do you want the iPhone to be *longer* than it is now? Or do you want them to shave off the sides and make it more skinny, just so you can say it has a 16:9 screen? :rolleyes: What about movies that are wider than 16:9? Apple is "*****ing" its customers because they call the iPhone widescreen? They've been calling their laptops and displays "widescreen" for about a decade now, and none of them has ever been 16:9.
 
InkMaster said:
iPhone Killer variation #56?

This is all so damn silly... Just release a damn good phone and sell it, why the hell does every single company have to point out who they're competing against, no-one cares, and you're only making yourself look like a desperate fool.

Then again, I guess for most companies these days, throwing in a a few iPhone mentions in the press release, is the best chance they have to get any mention anywhere :p
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Don't be stupid. Sony have nowhere mentioned that they want to compete with the iPhone, its the article writers who add this.
 
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