A PlayStation Phone?

Rumours that Sony Ericsson might be planning a gaming phone first surfaced last September after a press conference in Sweden. The firm's senior VP of product and application planning, Rikko Sakaguchi, let slip that Sony Ericsson was "working on something" on the gaming front, but "the surprise must be kept for the future".

All went quiet for a few months, but then last week the rumours flared up again, after a post on Spanish blog Clipset. The gist: Sony Ericsson is planning to revamp the user interface on some of its phones to mirror the XMB menu bar system used on both PSP and PlayStation 3. And that this may be a sign of an imminent PlayStation-branded phone.

(Running the Clipset post through Babelfish tells us that it "is almost safe that the next moving bodies of average and high range of Sony-Ericsson will change their system of menus by one tracing to the one of the PSP (so and as has made already the PS3), with a horizontal line... with the basic options and emergent icons in vertical for the submenus". Clear as mud, we hope you'll agree).

-- If Sony Ericsson made a PlayStation Phone... [PocketGamer]

I dunno - does Sony need another hardware line to worry about? Granted, Sony Ericsson makes some fine phones and I don't really think it would even be a huge challenge to them. The XMB menu system make some sense in terms of mobile design even without the inclusion of games ... and who makes a phone without a few games these days?

But what would they do with it? Unless it ran PSP or PS games that were downloadable it seems like a wasted concept.