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Whoop dee doo...The Playstation phone will run Android

Playstation phone? Yawn. Can it play Angry Birds?
Written by Christopher Dawson, Contributor

I should be excited about this...The Playstation was (and is) a hugely successful gaming platform, Android is a great mobile and embedded OS upon which I've happily hung my hat, and I have gadget junkie kids who are getting to the age when a cell phone is de rigueur. It should be a match made in heaven, right? Adrian Kingsley-Hughes suggests that it might be the handset that "derails the iPhone juggernaut." Yet the only words that come to mind are those my late Aunt Ruth used to utter with an ironic roll of the eyes and a swirl of her finger: Whoop dee doo.

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Why is it that Sony has had trouble selling its portable gaming devices? Because Playstation users value the intense and immersive gameplay associated with console Playstations. The Playstation 3 is a high-end media device, handling everything from BlueRay to Red Dead Redemption with aplomb. I'm not a gamer - I have neither the time nor the coordination to do more than challenge my kids at Mario Kart occasionally. But while plenty of games have found success on both the Android and iOS platforms, the serious games that have made the Playstation consoles so successful are a very poor fit for a mobile device. Whether that is a PSP or a Playstation Phone, this will absolutely not be an iPhone killer. It won't even be a big seller.

What sorts of games do people play on their phones? These are apps designed to pass idle time or add some value to an already useful converged device. Angry Birds is fun, but it's not the sort of thing you can play for 3 hours on a PlayStation. I downloaded Heavy Gunner, considered to be a fairly sophisticated game as phone apps go. My kids want nothing to do with it and I never touch it. We'd all rather use Pandora, play Antigen, and surf the Net. No, the Playstation phone, no matter what OS it runs, no matter what games it supports, and no matter how cool the custom Sony App Store that is alleged to be included with this rumored phone, will not even usurp the Droid X, let alone the iPhone.
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