does it matter?

think about this all smartphone's are handheld's, look what happened to dedicated PDA's one only has to look at what happened to Palm Inc.

look the smartphone market absorbed the PDA market..you only need one Hand Held at a time!

the PSP phone would seperate itself from the rest of the smartphone's by software.the Playstation Phone series of Phone's would be the only Handset's beside the PSP to have access to PSP game's.

" wouldn't trying to be at the same time and handheld and a smartphone a suicide?"

how would it?

you only use one handheld at a time, so your only going to have one handheld in you hands at one time.

right now Nintendo is the big boy in Handhelds the DS has sold very well moreso than the PSP. why would sony continue in that market dynamic directly when even the Apple Iphone is counted as a direct threat to their market share and it's a  smartphone!

by Placing the PSP in the Smartphone arene it would position it as a smartphoe with unique software only found on the PSP phone and the psp's. the prefect example is the Ipod touch..it's the Iphone without the phone function.

Sony already has several of those devices..the PSP!

but by adding a PSP smartphone they drive the PSP in a new market.

“We took a very sophisticated PlayStation middleware and shrunk it to fit the Android OS,”

Sony has been working with The Android OS for the past 2 year's i think that's exactly what they are going to do..it's a smart direction for the PSP platform.

lower the price on the PSPGo and phase out the UMD psp's completely from the market and just keep the PSPGo.

as the Non phone for PSP software..and create the PSPphone as the bridge device!

the PSPphone would be seen by many as a relaunch of the PSP platform.

On PSP GO: It's retarded to waste a lot of R&D money, advertising money, and development time on an idea that could fail. The PSP Go is a failure. So, would it be smart to make the PSP2 be download only when the PSP Go focused on that. You're hoping that Download only wasn't the problem and it was something else. if your right, OK. If your wrong, you wasted lot of time and money and hurt your brand. The potential lose outweights the potential gain.

On Apple:You said that it is mostly speculation. Yet, people are quoting it as fact. There is no data to prove that mobile games are hurting the handheld market. Until there is data to support it, I will consider anyone calling Apple a "threat," to just be spouting nonsense.

I see in some people a curiously squint-eyed approach: whatever Nintendo will do will succeed, whatever Apple will do will succeed, but it will affect only Sony and will miraculously spare Nintendo, and whatever Sony will do will fail and be crushed by either Nintendo, or Apple, or both. The most curious part is obviously the one about Apple, I'd find more sensible for it to aim at the biggest Nintendo market or at a new unexplored market of its own, not aiming from the start at the much smaller PSP niche, that may be comfortable for one contender, but it would become quite cramped for more.

And nobody even considers a possible MS entry into the portable market.

exactly the Dedicated PDA was absorbed by the Smartphone market..there is a reason...you only need one handheld..!

Microsoft will make Windows 7 smartphone it's xboxphone if they do one.

the smart phone is where everything is moving :

pretty soon Nintendo will be alone in the dedicated gaming handheld market. which is fine no doubt but there's no point to compete directly with Nintendo when the smartphone market has plenty of space for market share and great sales.

I think they should make a PSP2 but it should be innovative and offer something completely different to whats available now.

All they have to do is copycat the 3DS with more powerfull hardware. Oh and dual analog sticks. :P

i dont think they should scrap it. shore the DS has sold a hell of alot more than the psp and it hasnt had an easy life but the fact its sold almost 60,000,000 shows that it has been a sucses and alot of people forget that this was sony's first venture into portable gaming where as nintendo been there ages o however you look at it they sucseeded

Microsoft is already entering the market. Windows mobile 7 games are about as close to an Xbox 360 Arcade title as you can get without actually making them 1:1. IIRC the code base of a typical game is 97% identical. So it goes without saying that Windows Mobile 7 will get a decent supply of downloadable games, enough to make it a gaming platform in its own right.

@Smashchu:

"According to an NPD data analysis, the iPhone is now responsible for 19% of all revenue generated by handheld games (as of 2009), compared to the PSP’s 11%. Obviously, the DS still reigns supreme with 70%."

http://socialmediaseo.net/2010/03/25/iphone-beats-psp/

Given the fact that the iPhone has a superior (read more profitable) distibution model the likely split between iPhone and DS is likely to be closer to >30% publisher revenue compared to <65% for the DS as the distribution fee is a flat 30% vs the obvious packaging, distrubution, retailer and license costs from Nintendo.

You've been spouting this crap in a couple threads now.  There's an infinite difference between what Sony is doing with 3D and what Nintendo is doing.  We are excited about the 3DS because IT DOESN'T NEED GLASSES. If Nintendo's next console is 3DTV enabled, I won't give a crap.  I will NOT wear glasses to watch things in 3D.  It simply does not work for me.  There's going to have to be something else. 

I think I can speak for most of us that the 'pioneering' that Nintendo is doing vastly out classes what Sony is doing.  I promise you, that if the PSP2 had been announced first, with glasses-free 3D, I would think it a great innovation.  But, it's not the 3D that has me excited for the 3DS.  It's the software.

Stop putting words in our mouths, you're not very good at it.

Perhaps not if you look at it from a return on investment perspective. Remember that the end goal is not to sell the most consoles, it's not even to make some profit. It's to make a worthwhile return on your investment (compared to other things you could invest in). If you can't do that, it's not worth it.

It could have been argued that PSP had gotten a foothold into the handheld market and was therefore a worthwhile investment, but the situation for Sony now is different to the situation when they launched PSP, as it is a PSP2 is going to have an even harder time than it's predecessor. This one will not have the confidence of the industry behind it, and on top of that Nintendo have a head start this time.