Mockup designs for Sony’s rumored PSP Phone are nearly are unappetizing as the pre-iPhone iPhone mockups were.Take this one, for instance, published in foreign-language “Phone Mag.” It went for the “boring enough to be convincing” cachet.
The mushrooms kicked in long before T3 found its way to this next idea’s awful D-pad — it’s based on a patent Sony itself filed.
It isn’t clear where the next one came from. My hunch is that the artist isn’t going to be around any time soon to request attribution…
The best of a bad bunch has another D-pad that would get a real industrial designer taken out back and whipped with damp towels:
Connext’s design is pure Yanko:
Another hard-to-source one that crops up over and over is this, which resembles one of those little portable import consoles that just plays old Nintendo ROMs.
Sealover still loves that awful Spiderman font:
Clipset designs a controller only Derek Zoolander could love:
Matt Brady crosses the streams:
“There is a strong sense of authenticity,” wrote one blogger beneath this image:
They couldn’t possibly do it without including a UMD drive:
Unwired View uncovered a child’s drawing of the most obvious and banal possible implementation of a PSP Phone, that being the one filed by Sony Ericsson with the patent office:
The appropriately-named I’m Bored has the right idea:
My bets are on something like the pspGO, except with a touchscreen and a bit more bulk.
I have to go with Musicawoods, with the iPhone sharing the same sleek black aesthetic that Sony itself enjoys, a PSP phone isn’t going to have 50 different buttons all over it.
After deciding to take on the Wii’s motion functionality and with the DS still winning in the portable market, i could see Sony taking on the touch-screen aspect as well. It will still have the slide-out button set of the PSPGO, but with touch screen phone functions that will find some place in games as well, although not to the same degree as the DS.
Having said that, Sony is so ridiculously slow to adapt to current trends who knows what they will come out with. And with separate departments so notoriously bad at working and communicating together, who knows if it will come out at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if the phone functions had to be developed by the PSP team instead.
If that is how Sony PSP phone is going to look like i think it’s good. Sony usually make good music phone and camera. Why not gaming phone..Sony rule
The “D-pad that would get a real industrial designer taken out back and whipped with damp towels” – they’ve already done it.
http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/k850i?lc=en&cc=us
I reviewed that one!
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/03/a-weekend-with/
“That rail of a D-Pad [is] well designed, but fiddly and unintuitive in combination.”
Actually, I thought sealover’s “butterfly” design looked pretty slick, apart from the typography.
Reminds me of the keyboard on the Thinkpad 701, which was truly a triumph of industrial design. I found one in a bin a few years back, and was amazed by the robustness of the construction.