charlequin said:
It's clearly not any kind of early prototype -- it's got a "final"-style hardware shape, brand logo for Sony Ericsson, fully labeled gaming buttons, etc. Nothing about the hardware itself screams "unfinished"; it looks like the sort of things that you show off right before an announcement, at the phase when your decision on how to brand your system should be entirely complete.
It would be absolutely bizarre for a device that's the successor to the PSP to carry no Playstation branding of any kind and only feature the SE logo, but it'd be quite normal for an SE phone that leveraged certain aspects of the Playstation without actually being a SCE product.
The question is though, what if it's 'just'
a successor? One device that runs the next-gen PSP platform?
I do not think it would be desirable for all such devices to be overtly 'Playstation' looking or whatever. At the start of course, the vast majority of people buying a device like this would be the Playstation crowd, but I think they would intend for that to become 'just' a feature that's piggybacked into a wider base of hands via a range of devices. In that case, the Playstation branding shouldn't be hugely conspicuous or overwhelming.
(I do think, though, a final rev of this design would have a playstation logo somewhere on the outer casing - hopefully though something very subtle! Note also - a lot of the back of the device is covered in masking tape. There might be branding lying underneath, and I could understand why SE would want to hide it if these prototypes might be carried in public for example.)
charlequin said:
Poor juggling of alternate development paths? That's also assuming this is something that even gets announced rather than a drawing-board prototype that winds up never seeing the light of day for exactly the reason you state (it confuses the market given the likely phone SKU for the real PSP2 next year.)
Also, smartphone release schedules are completely different from console release schedules. Sony Ericsson could announce this thing next month and have it already on the shelves before the PSP2 is even announced.
I think it's extremely unlikely that this is unrelated, at the very least.
I'll grant you that it's possible it's not
exactly the same as the PSP2 platform, but I think it must be related.
I do not think SCE would involve themselves in a disjoint platform. And based on Sony's comments I think it's a good assumption SCE is involved (if the presence of the Playstation interface wasn't enough). They're not going to devote dev resources to both their own handheld and to a little jaunt by Sony Ericsson.
You could perhaps argue that this device might run a subset of the PSP2 platform. Maybe the next-gen iteration of the minis platform. Stuff aimed at the lighter gamer. The PSP2 then would run these games and others. You could argue it satisfies the 'no redundancy' claim of that Sony guy, and satisfactorily explain the involvement of SCE.
However that itself raises sticky questions. Like...how would this platform compete vs Android on the same device? What would be the USP over Android? If it's targeting the type of games already headed to Android (as minis does), it might be very tough to see the point of this. If it brought the whole platform though, that problem disappears. Ditto, if this platform required any custom hardware, why put that hardware (and a functionally equivalent interface) into the phone and then not let it play all the software? Sony would be closing off an audience for no good reason.
charlequin said:
I mean, look at it this way: has anyone ever gotten their hands on a fully-functional prototype hardware for a brand-new gaming console or handheld (not a revision of an existing system) that's yet to even be announced and whose release date would have to be nearly a year in the future? The scale of leak you're talking about in that case is off the charts, utterly unprecedented in the industry.
It's probably kind of unprecedented for this many parties to have access to prototypes of different versions of a device though. If devices are being worked on in Tokyo AND Sweden that does enhance the chances of leakage.
charlequin said:
Given the stage we're at with the PSP2 devkit rumors (i.e. basically the same spot we were at around February with the 3DS) prototype hardware of this sort shouldn't even exist for the PSP2 and certainly shouldn't be in hands outside the company.
(And all the devkit rumors talk about the PSP like a regular handheld, not a phone, suggesting that any phone version that exists is the "value added" version, not the primary SKU. And so on.)
Of course this needn't be the 'SCE PSP2' - the primary SKU, if you want to put it that way. The argument that's put forward is that it might be 'a' SKU. Also, I do believe prototypes for PSP2 would be knocking about at this stage, and if Sony Ericsson is involved with a device on their end, certainly then people outside SCE would have prototypes of their own company's device.
As for devs, SCE could give them kits to work on games without whispering a word to them about broader device strategy. Pubs would probably have been briefed, but frontline devs who might do leaking? A lot of them might be in the dark.