Sony’s Playstation Portable to be the CES Mobile Messaging Device?
by Ewan Spence
With CES starting this Sunday, the rumour mill is already firing up, but the one of interest to me looks to be a racing certainty after Sony announced on their CES site that they would be bringing Skype to the Sony Playstation Portable device.
Call friends, talk trash to fellow gamers, or catch up with acquaintances via Skype for PSP System.
That’s right – a games console, with roughly 30 million or so units in circulation, will all of a sudden be switched on, via over the air firmware upgrades, to become VOIP telephones. That’s a masterstroke (and one that Nokia are tying to mimic in reverse, by switching on the N-Gage gaming features in millions of Nseries devices).
I’ve always been amazed at just how multi-media the Sony PSP games console is. Using Wi-fi and the built in web browser, it lets me read my email whenever I’m in Wi-Fi range. The built in podcasting application will stream audio or video, or save it to the memory stick for alter viewing 9something that the iPods still can’t do without iTunes support). You can watch full movies on the go, stack up your mp3’s take family pictures, and a recent addition of internet streaming radio, while still a little unwieldy, provides yet another way to get messages into the device.
Now Sony are starting to publicly explore how they’re getting messages out of the device, there’s going to be a lot of people wondering why such a machine is still marketed as solely a gaming console.
All that’s missing is some sort of instant messaging application and we have a 2.0 comms device already here. And funnily enough, that’s exactly what Sony’ partnership with BT in the UK will provide; the Go!Messenger was promised for January 2008 and should be here soon.
