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Subject: Playstation Phone “Zeus” has been revealed
A video has surfaced on YouTube which shows the new Playstation Phone now called the Zeus. Rumors had surfaced that the phone would be announced on December 9th but with this leak the rumors have now been made fact. The phone is called the Sony Ericsson ZEUS (Playstation Phone). The demo video shows the phone running Android 2.3 codename Gingerbread. The video also shows the phone with the standard Playstation buttons along with a touch pad in the center. The controller for the phone is placed normally where a physical keyboard would be. The phone looks pretty nice and might be fun to play with, we will have to see if we can get our hands on one of these.
Phone Mode:
Game Mode:
my take on this:
i think this is a terrible idea. (please note: it's successful or failure has little to do with it being a good or bad idea, just look at the "pet rock," horrible idea, great success.) i dont like cellphone games. i dont like tiny controls. i dont like this idea.
my guess is that they are going for the download only "app store" distribution system to crush the used games market (which they dont profit from). that didnt fly with the PSP whatever variant and this one is exactly the same (even looks the same) except it's also a phone.
note: this is speculative
- it's going to have horrific battery life when playing games because it uses a tiny battery which has shit for capacity.
- the games will be shitty because of a lack of cpu/gpu processing power, lack of storage space and bandwidth restrictions.
there are two ways they could get actually bypass the processing vs battery life issue
- they use an ARM variant that has a GPU or GPU abilities that's fast which would most likely come from Marvell(it's what they do).
- the phone's processor is ARM but when in game mode it merely does hypervisor stuff and there are a secondary MIPS processor and graphics processor.
why MIPS? it's been sony's pattern to go with MIPS (PSX, PSP, PS2) because... they like it? MIPS CPUs are used in some cellphones but with heavy processing, it is going to eat the cellphone's battery alive. one thing is for sure, it will be a RISC based CPU as they have never used anything else and frankly it's easier for developers to work with assembly language programming if you use RISC, which is why it was invented in the first place. ARM is RISC, so who knows, maybe they thought this through (fat chance!).
i have no doubt that it wont be faster than the PSP, so i dont see developers all jumping ship for this.
in the event that i'm wrong in a major way, i'll be sure to wave to the four horsemen for you.
