Way back in the early 2000s, I bought a Nokia N-Gage. It was the first phone geared towards mobile gaming. It was terrible, but I loved the idea. I quickly moved on to a cheap candy bar phone. At the same time, I also picked up a PSP. It's like a PS Vita but with physical game discs. As far as phones went, I kept moving. I got one of the windows based PDAs, then moved on to an international version of the LG Env2 (I was with Big Orange instead of Big Red at the time, so I needed one that would take a SIM) then to a cheapo candy bar again after my LG went swimming, and finally to one of the first real smart phones, the iPhone. During that entire elaborate phone swapping and changing, one thing stayed the same: the PSP.
It would play my music, it would play my movies, it would play my games and it would browse the internet. It did everything that I wanted out of a mobile device, except text and make phone calls, but I begrudgingly carried a phone for that. Once I finally laid hands on an iPhone though, that all changed. Now I had a single device that would do everything! It was so much more convenient to just carry one device! As I used my PSP less and less because it was so much more convenient to just carry around one thing, I thought more and more about selling it. One day I finally pulled that trigger and dumped all my games and the system.
Jump forward to Christmas time, 2011. I've just made the jump from iOS to Android with the Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket. Then the PS Vita is announced! No more discs, you download the games directly! It also comes with a 3G antenna built in! Is this what I've wanted since 2003 and did I make a horrible mistake changing over instead of waiting?! Will I finally have a gaming phone that will play actual games? Specifically games that don't suck terribly and maybe even allow me to play classic games I love on the go without having to run an emulator? As we all now know, the answer to all these questions and more was a resounding NO.
Then another year came and went and the Xperia Play 4G popped up on my radar. Ok, now we're talking! It runs Android! It has a slide out controller instead of a keyboard! It runs something that sounds a lot like the Playstation Network out of the box! A good gaming phone at last! Only, lolno. By the time I had my hands on it, it was running Gingerbread in a world where all the new phones where loaded with Jellybean. I ran with it for awhile, and it was great for my SNES and NES emulators. Sadly, it was never powerful enough to run an actual PSX emulator, and it was depressing to look at the tiny catalog of PSX~ish games offered. As software updated, it eventually became unusable as anything but a backup phone, and thus again the dream of a gaming phone died once more.
Here is where we talk about how Sony desperately doesn't want to make money. I loved the idea of the Xperia Play. A phone with dedicated controls for gaming, but a touch screen for interaction with the phone OS. You know what else fits that description? The PS Vita. It retails for $199.99 as of the writing of this blog entry. The OS for it is unique, and the design is unlike anything else on the market (phone wise). Why is this not a phone? It can clearly support a cellular antenna, since it was initially offered with one. They don't have to make it Android based. Just add a phone dialer app, sms/mms app, and an email client (for contact sync as much as anything else) and boom, it's good to go! Hardware wise, all that needs to be added is an earpiece speaker and a cell antenna. It even has a microphone already built in; it would just need to be moved to accommodate using the device in the cell position.
Let's say when all is said and done, the total cost per unit for the cell phone ready version went up by $200 dollars; total price, $399.99. Right now Big Orange, Big Red and Big Yellow all have phones for at least $100 more than that completely free with a two year contract. I think it would be much easier for kids and teens to talk parents into forking over $0 for a new game system than $200. 77% of kids ages 12 to 17 have a cell phone. More than 50% have a handheld game console. Even if we assume 100% overlap between the two groups and no growth in the percentage with cell phones, that's potentially 25% of a highly lucrative demographic that could be added to the handheld market without parents (the actual source of the majority of the money being spent) having to invest a single extra dime. You would also have more games being bought due to PSNs crossbuy feature netting potentially 3 games for the price of one: one for a home console, one for a handheld game system, and one for a phone. Not to mention that this would hardly preclude the continued manufacture and sale of the PS Vita classic non-phone version. Just leave out the cell antenna and earpiece to save on manufacturing costs and keep selling that one as is. They could probably both be built on the same assembly line.
What about the functionality that would be lost by creating a phone with yet another mobile operating system? Well that's the great part; it doesn't have to be a new mobile operating system! Instead of trying to build an Android based gaming phone that will interface with the PSN or garner 3rd party developer support for a whole new mobile OS, why not just build an Android emulator that could be downloaded from the PSN onto the Vita phone? Android 4.4 and up are all built to have 100% of the interaction done via the touchscreen. The three buttons (or more depending on which custom build your device runs) are part of the screen itself, so no extra buttons would be needed. Running it as an emulation may not give Android the power to run high end games, but you've got the whole PSN catalog available if you want that. What it would do is give the Vita phone the ability to interface with two already huge online marketplaces, giving it a huge boost in functionality without requiring a large investment of time or money on either Sony's or the developer's part...
Although they might still want to look into adding some of the more popular social media apps. I hear that Facebook thing is pretty big...
Update: Apparently Sony is dumping the whole "make this vast preexisting store/gaming platform available in any way form or fashion to the vast mobile device gaming market" idea. Why do you hate money so much?
