Doens't mean anything
It could happen, but patents are filed all the time for stuff which never comes to light.
Sony has long denied rumours that it's working on a PlayStation Portable (PSP) phone, but the company has lots of explaining to do now that a new Sony Ericsson patent application has come to light detailing just such a device. PSP_design_1 Sony Ericsson's sketch for a PSP-cum-phone The online application shows a device …
Patents usually show a generic design to illustrate the points the patent is meant to cover. After the designers have at it, any PSP phone is likely to look dramatically different.
Anyway a PSP phone would be an awesome beast. It's going to have to use storage instead of UMD so I wonder what that means for existing PSP owners. If Sony have sense, they'll produce a UMD dock where you can sync games to the phone in some way.
Who is this aimed at?
For most gamer type games a touch screen control pad would be awful, vibrating feedback or not. For casual games the price is likely to be too high.
Is the thing going to have a big screen for decent graphics and be too big for a phone or is it going to be a pocket sized phone with a screen too small to game with?
Will it be backwards compatable to the current PSP and need a UMD drive making it bulky and a battery hog or will everyone have to buy their games all over again?
It looks to be the n-gage all over again to me.
Well thats innovative!
All well and good for 'relatively' slow GUI access - works great on the iPhone for this very reason.
But in a games console/phone combo? I'm not sure, I would wager the touchscreen wouldn't provide the tactile feedback which a normal -raised- pushbutton provides, which is quite important.
Might be able to get used to it I suppose, it would indeed solve the sizing mismatch between traditional mobile phone and PSP forms.
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@DrXym - thats not the device shape they're patenting, but just the screen, the pics demonstrate the on screen switchover capability between phone and games console and associated touch locations.