PlayStation Team Wants Android Engineers
Sony's PlayStation team is looking for engineers with Android development experience fueling reports that the company is planning a PSP phone powered by Android.
There is absolutely nothing new about PSP phone rumors. Every since smartphones hit the mainstream, there's been will they/won't they talk regarding a phone based on Sony's popular handheld gaming console. However, Android Central points to a recent Sony PlayStation job posting for a server engineer based in London that requires applicants to have "experience in mobile development, specifically Android."
Android Central speculates that Sony is aiming to pad its internal game development teams with some Android talent to ensure they have launch titles for an Android PSP phone. Engadget's Nilay Patel writes that they could be prepping an Android/PSN service to combat Xbox Live on Windows Phone 7 and Apple's iOS Game Center.
The most recent rumors involving a PlayStation phone was word of an Xperia-branded phone that would also carrier the PlayStation brand and feature a touchscreen measuring between 3.7- and 4.1-inches and a slide out panel with game controls. Instead of analog controls, the device is said to have a long narrow touchpad. The phone is said to boast a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU under the hood and a 5-megapixel camera. Android 3.0 would be the operating system along with a custom UI on top.
Would you buy a PSP phone running Android? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: Android Central, Sony, Engadget
Of course i'd buy it anyway if it didn't but won't be as happy unless it did.
oh yes, all those professional game devs are really gonna want to start coding all their games in Java...
God I hope they improve the dev toolchains.
Androids "Might" that's a big maybe, suck at gaming. But although i love the iPhone, Android is just so much lighter and faster than iOS4. My friends iPhone is not even half filled (it's a 3GS) and it's slower than watching paint dry. (more like slower than my cousins G1) so... I think I give android props, but... At least the iPhone has jailbreak XD even though thats illegal.
Does anyone remember Ngage? it was a good idea but in the end do you want something as bulky as a psp to act as your phone? Not to mention battery life of such a device if its heavily used!I can't really see it being kept within reasonable costs without it sucking as a phone or a gaming device. Maybe touch screens could change that but I can still see it costing too much if its to get the balance right between performance, battery and functionality.
Even the systems that had a Windows based OS (Dreamcast, Xbox, and 360) were so closed in their manufacturing you still needed to purchase a dev kit to legitimately develop for it.
Open OS on gaming consoles will lead to the same inevitable fate that the grandfather consoles of gaming faced when there were too many developers releasing poor quality titles in large amounts in the early 80's. Didn't we learn anything from the crash of '83?
As much as people complained about how Nintendo controlled every aspect of game production on its system, it was that strategy that allowed the gaming market to rebuild itself, and we've kept the same strategy for years. Now we are going to go backwards and repeat the same mistakes.
If the iPhone was strictly a gaming system, and there was no phone plan or music portion of iTunes to tie to it to constantly draw revenue, it would have failed long ago on the software side due to the massive amounts of shovelware on its store. I mean really, how many damn tower defense, castle siege, infinite looped platform jumping, and catapulting games do we need?
We don't need an open OS on a console, we need one that is closed so that there is a greater level of QA for games being published for the system. Open OS's are really only viable on phones (to make among other things, interoperability between carriers and other models easier), computers (because sometimes you just need to customize certain things for varying hardware and needs) and home theatre entertainment devices like BD players and TV's so that it's easier for those to interact with each other with HDMI-CIC content and such.
Consoles don't need open OS's because there isn't any variation in the actual hardware specs aside from some improved fabrication processes to reduce cost and increase power/heat efficiency. The only reason anyone would need (and I'm talking actual NEED not WANT because I might use it on a random whim) an open OS on a console is to pirate and/or practice developing games. Which is what the general consumer does not do, and therefore tips the entire balance of risk reward for the manufacturer to leave themselves open to possible malicious use versus the additional appeal to the mostly rare power user who would make use of it without abusing it. Also, makes things easier when it comes to troubleshooting, for the most part with a closed OS, if you have an issue it's one they are aware of and know how to fix (or if it can't be fixed) and expedites the process a lot faster than if there was an open OS where someone could literally rewrite the kernel and jack things up beyond belief.
thats a good point actually. Qualcom GPUs have sucked mostly. atleast use a powerVR chip or something...