10 million Sony PSPs sold

Ever lowering number use current firmware

By Marc McEntegart: Monday 24 October 2005, 09:52

SONY COMPUTER r Entertainment said that the ten millionth PSP has shipped.

The figure is broken down into sales across the three release areas with three million sold in Japan/Asia, 4.47 million in North America and 2.53 million in Europe. This is the quickest penetration of any Playstation hardware launch to date.

Along with these statistics is the fact that only 19.6 million games have been shipped. The number is being chased down by the 15 million UMD movies sold already. While some have been quick to point out the unfair comparison, as movies cost just about half what a game does, this isn't the first time we've seen evidence that the PSP is serving as a videogame console secondary to its media playback.

Regardless of how well this might suit competition from the upcoming video i-Pod and the myriad of hard drive storage media players out there, the statistic is set to swing favourably towards games with the release of GTA: Liberty City Stories next week. µ

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Sony announced at the business briefing yesterday the PSP-290 Sony PSP accessory, which is a GPS receiver.

I updated our nearly 1 year old Sony PSP Feature Request round-up, where GPS was one of the hottest requests. Sony needs time, but they get around to release features that Sony PSP fans want to have eventually.
GameSpot has published slides from the Sony Business Briefing showing a blurry image of the Sony PSP GPS antenna. The mounting looks similar to the Sony PSP microphone.
The GPS antenna is supposed to update every second and has a 40 second cold start until fixing the satellites.
There has been already a Sony PSP Map software announced (photo).

Nowadays everything seems to be converging into a mobile phone. It already can be a perfectly good digital camera (e.g. SE K850i Cybershot), a mobile TV station a music player or GPS receiver. One of the things missing here was a mobile gaming platform. But it’s coming too.

And who’s better positioned to create a perfect mobile gaming platform then Sony? It already has one - Sony PSP. It also makes some great mobile phones via joint venture with Swedish Ericsson.

Their recent patent filing shows how Sony Ericsson will go about integrating these two gadgets:



The main question Sony Ericsson asked when designing PSP phone was - what is the main problem with using your phone for mobile games?

And the answer was - gaming controls.The numeric keypad is just not good enough to control the action in games. But who says all the keys on the numeric keypad have to be identical?

Sony has already designed very good game controls on PSP. So now they just made a few keys on numeric keypad into a game controls and the problem was solved.

The other problem was that most of the good games are played holding PSP console with both hands and using two thumbs to control game characters. And the phone is operated usually with a single hand and thumb.

Rotating screen came to the rescue here. When the device is in a phone mode, all you have is a simple mobile phone with numeric keypad , menu and function keys. Turn the screen around 180 degrees, your menu/functional keys are transformed into game controls and you have a perfectly good portable gaming device.

Oh and why not use the screen turned 90 degrees to make this device into a mobile TV station as well?

The beauty of it all is that Sony will not have to worry about the games for the PSP phone. Just make it compatible with the standard PSP games and Nokia will have a really tough time catching up with it’s next gen N-Gage platform.

There have been plenty of PSP rumors swirling about, and one of them that erratically pops up here and there is the PSP Phone theory. There has been evidence of Sony's plans for such a unit, but Sony has never officially confirmed anything. However, an eagle-eyed reader has noticed something quite telling in the latest issue of Sony magazine.

As you can see in this photo, the proof is clear- "A new PSP-STYLE PHONE is apparently in development. There are even suggestion that it could be in the shops as early as February." (source-Engadget) Some time ago, we had heard about this possibility from Sony's Jim Ryan, when he said a PSP Phone is "definitely plausible." Many are now starting to wonder if this could be a major announcement at next week's Game Developers Conference, and they're further speculating that this special little unit might actually arrive some time later this year. We'd love to hear something concrete, but hey, we'd like to think Sony Magazine is semi-official to begin with.

This has quickly become one of the primary things we'll be looking for at GDC 2008, so if Sony decides to step forward with their plans for a PSP Phone next week, we'll tell ya immediately.