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Sony places bet on cell phone industry

The company will rely on other companies to make platforms for its mobile games

SCE have admitted that they have no plans to develop their own games-orientated mobile phone devices. Despite a wide range of popular mobiles produced by mother company Sony, SCE will instead develop and target games at a preinstalled base of mobile phone users, thanks to its strategic alliances with NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone. To Develop portable gaming devices, according to one of SCE's senior directors Kenichi Fukunaga, would be a "costly enterprise that made little sense". "Making portable devices would mean having to compete directly with mobile phones," he said, before claiming that "We couldn't offer devices with the same capabilities and price." Obviously Mr. Fukunaga doesn't want to concede that Nintendo utterly dominates the gaming portables market for fear of looking bad, but we're pretty sure that's the message. Really though, if Sony really wanted to distribute a viable mobile phone gaming platform, they could do several things. Firstly, they could license Videologic's new PowerVR MBX, which does all sorts of graphics magic on mobile and 3G platforms. Then they could use their own mobile phone division to develop a phone of the perfect size, weight and performance. Then they could use their established brands to market it and sell millions. There's all sorts of possibilities to wrongfoot Nintendo on this one, but SCE have no intention of trying to do so. Instead of dropping millions on R&D for such a device, they would presumably rather focus on other more pressing matters. Why? Because like so many of their competitors, they are strung up on promises which they made at the beginning of the year, of features they are now forced to develop, like the PlayStation 2's high-speed Internet connectivity, and the PlayStation 3's chip design. Development elsewhere and huge competition from Nintendo are of course perfectly valid reasons not to waste time on the development of a mobile gaming platform, but if they aren't going to do it, the least they could do is give us the real reasons why not! Related Feature - Sony's plans made public

Source - Reuters