How's this fore a juicy piece of news? Sony are rumoured to be working on a PSP phone. Nothing new there, a PSP phone's been rumoured for years, ever since the first Sony brand (Walkman) was added to a mobile phone and people started wondering what other brands Sony might offer up.

But note that I didn't say Sony Ericsson are working on a PSP phone - I said Sony.

Amid what analysts are describing as "an increasingly frosty relationship" between Sony and Ericsson, Sony are apparently considering developing a PSP phone all by themselves, leaving Sony Ericsson to develop far-feebler gaming phones such as the F305 that was announced last week.

A PSP phone for 2009?

Rather than developing a specific PSP phone, the rumour claims that Sony are actually considering enabling the PSP with mobile phone technology. Personally, I'm somewhat skeptical of this, as there's no way a PSP can be used to make voice calls in a traditional phone-like way - it's just too big. You need a Bluetooth ear slug for proper voice communication, and that's hardly what we expect of our mobile phones.

In addition, you can't exactly shove a PSP into your pocket in the same way you can a mobile phone, and so your average user would need to have a backup phone for those times when they want to be in touch with their friends and not have a lumping great gadget that won't fit in their trousers on show (like in the pub or a club, for example).

In other words, a PSP phone couldn't possibly replace a mobile phone, it could only offer additional communication facilities to the mobile phone they'll already have. But how many users want to carry two mobile phones around with them? Surely that's the whole point of the mobile phone's convergence: it's the only device you'll ever need (at least in theory).

So a PSP phone that's more PSP than phone makes no sense; rather, what I expect to see is a much smaller PSP with phone abilities that can be used as a dedicated mobile phone. That's if Sony are working on a PSP phone at all (they're currently saying nothing, but they always say that for any future product). The rumour claims it won't be released until late 2009, so we've some way to go before we find out for definite.

Sony and Ericsson falling out?

Of more immediate interest is the frosting of relations between Sony and Ericsson. According to the report (by no less than Marketing Week, by the way, which is not your usual gossip rag), "Sony has learned from its “strategic error” of giving its Walkman branding to Sony Ericsson. An insider adds that internal conversations have already confirmed that Sony would “never give its PlayStation branding” to the Sony Ericsson joint venture."

Ouch! What lessons are these? Not sure, but a 47% drop in profits for the first three months of 2008 certainly can't have helped.

We live in interesting times, it seems. With Motorola on its last legs and now Sony Ericsson seemingly wobbling, we could be headed for a three way mobile phone market, with just Nokia, Samsung and LG cleaning up (and yes, I know there's Apple with its iPhone, but the 6 million iPhones that it shipped last year represents just 2% of the number of phones that Nokia shipped).

[Source: Marketing Week]