February 14, 2012, 8:30 AM —
You'll be able to do a lot of things on the Playstation Vita when it launches next week. Play games, of course. But you'll also be able to browse the web, watch Netflix (as of the 21st), listen to music and catch up with friends on Twitter. One thing you won't be able to do? Make a phone call.
Now normally you wouldn't expect to make a phone call with a gaming console, but the Vita seems to have everything you'd expect to find in a smart phone. 3G radio, GPS, touch screen interface, front and rear cameras. Strip away the physical controls and it'd appear, to a casual observer, to be a smart phone.
It turns out the idea of a Vita Phone isn't all that far-fetched and in fact Sony seems to be considering the idea. In a Japanese Q&A session, Sony Computer Entertainment Senior VP Yoshio Matsumoto told reporters "...if you’re asking if we’ve made it [the Vita OS] in a way that’s expandable, so that it’s possible to apply to smart phones and tablets on top of achieving the high responsiveness we need for gaming devices — it is possible. … that doesn’t mean that we’re applying it to smart phones and tablets at this point in time, but it’s been designed with expandability in mind." Thanks to Electronista for the translation.
So somewhere down the line we might see a Vita smart phone, hopefully one that includes physical controls similar to the Xperia Play.
But what about Skype? As of last summer, the Vita was expected to have a Skype client (the last generation Sony handheld, the Playstation Portable, has Skype). For instance, see this Venturebeat piece from last August. As far as I can ascertain (I didn't get a Vita ahead of launch, unfortunately) the Vita doesn't come with Skype installed nor have I seen any indication that this will change. Perhaps when Microsoft bought Skype it threw a monkey-wrench into those plans.
Sony of course has been betting heavily on Android lately, with both the Xperia line of smart phones and the Sony Tablet S and P. We've heard a lot about the Android-based "Playstation Suite" that is supposed to offer a standardized gaming framework on Android devices. The Vita will also support the Playstation Suite, which seems to imply that the Vita will either emulate Android, or perhaps run it as a guest OS. Either way it sounds as though there'll be cross-over between Android devices and the Vita.
Whether all this is driving towards a cohesive strategy or not is still up in the air. We have the Vita possibly running (some of) the Android software we'd traditionally find on a smart phone, and we have the possibility of a smart phone that jettisons Android in favor of the Vita OS. Are we seeing part of a plan or just random ideas being thrown at the wall to see what sticks?
After Kaz Hirai was tagged to be the next Sony CEO he talked about his plans to get the company back on track, saying there were no 'sacred areas' in the company and implying that he wasn't afraid to shake things up. [Wall Street Journal] He also outlined a 4-point plan that would, among other things, strengthen the company's position in the mobile market and leverage its gaming assets by building unique mobile products only Sony can provide and in general accelerating innovation.
The Vita OS is certainly unique to Sony. Are we seeing the first steps towards accomplishing this part of his Kaz's master plan?
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