Sony is now to Google what Apple once was
Time was Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board and Mr. Jobs on that of Google's. The acrimony engendered by Android's entrance onto the smartphone stage and Steve's megalomaniacal sense of victimhood ("we didn't enter the search business!") ended all that. And so the marriage of the sexiest hardware maker to the most beautiful software firm, joined from the first day by their greatest enemy, Microsoft, ended.
Enter Sony, whose last global product offering, the PSP Go, only underscored what a growing embarrassment Sony is to the industry. Samsung has eclipsed them in core markets and has the muscle to release an iPad competitor (if not killer).
Engadget broke the PSP Phone (code named Zeus) story this week and has confirmed it: Android 3, marketplace of serious games, nice design:
I'll assume 800 x 480 but it would be great if they came in higher, or could run 720p. Its unique but Sony has rarely been a leader in mobiles, while it is often owned the TV space.
While Apple TV is a "hobby" for Apple and essentially an iTunes shill, Google TV finally brings the browser to the sofa and the bed, plus Hulu for yanks and iPlayer for us. YouTube is the world's second largest search engine. This will be big. A partnership with Sony makes a lot of sense for both but the premium charged over an offline TV is exorbitant - $300-$400 more according to Engadget. You could buy a Logitech Revue for that price difference but the Revue is a joke - 1.2GHz Z-series Atom processor in a plastic box that's extra big to get rid of the heat from the passively cooled CPU.
We have a sliver of a fraction of their resources yet we could a) design a fanless set top box with custom heatpipe that dissipates heat into the room and not the PC case b) build a fanless board into a 26" or 32" TV for much less than a $300 premium.
Maybe we will.