Hasta La Gadget!

Sony just dropped a bomb on the Japanese stage — not a single PlayStation Phone, but a PlayStation Phone experience for everybody. The company unveiled a cross-platform software framework called PlayStation Suite, which sounds rather boring in those words, but what it amounts to is an official PlayStation Store filled with games for your Android tablets and cellphones. Sony’s starting with an emulator for existing PSOne titles and is promising an Android game store later this year, but soon it might be much, much more: the company’s calling PlayStation Suite a “hardware-neutral” development framework to make games portable for all sorts of handhelds, and says that “new and exciting content” is also on the way.

Sony will sponsor a first-party licensing and quality-assurance scheme called PlayStation Certified, and provide the marketplace as well, likely hoping to attract major game developers to build top-tier titles for mobile and get a piece of the action too. If your device doesn’t have have a pop-out gamepad handy, it looks like PlayStation Suite will emulate touchscreen controls, and you won’t necessarily need a phone to get in on the action, as Sony says the next-generation PlayStation Portable will be compatible with games developed for PlayStation Suite right off the bat. Doesn’t look like we’re getting any details on game prices or compatible devices, but we imagine one particular phone will change all that at Mobile World Congress next month.

Update: Looks like PlayStation Suite requires Android 2.3 at a minimum, and it’s PSOne, not PlayStation Portable titles that will be emulated here, despite Kaz Hirai’s quote during the festivities. PR after the break!

Continue reading Sony reveals PlayStation Suite framework, store for Android gaming

Sony reveals PlayStation Suite framework, store for Android gaming originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola had one of the best CES showings of any company in recent memory, and now we’ve got some rough ship dates for all that new gear: CEO Sanjay Jha just announced on the company’s earnings call that the Atrix 4G for AT&T and 3G Xoom for Verizon will arrive at “the end of February,” while the LTE-enabled Droid Bionic and LTE Xoom will arrive at “the end of the second quarter” as previously promised. That sounds good to us — and with that earlier Best Buy leak suggesting the Xoom will hit on February 17, we’re hoping that Moto’s taking a long view of when the end of February actually begins. Even better, a late February Xoom release supports those rumors that Honeycomb will be generally released in March, which is when the real Android tablet invasion will begin. It’s all happening, folks.

Update: Oh boy. Jha followed up his Xoom comments in the Q&A portion by hinting that the Xoom might slip to March, but that he’s very confident they’ll make their timeline. Fingers crossed.

Motorola Atrix 4G and Xoom tablet launching at the end of February, Droid Bionic and LTE Xoom in Q2 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft just dropped a few tidbits of knowledge on us regarding Windows Phone 7’s performance in the marketplace so far. Here’s what we’ve got:

• ‘Early research’ says 93 percent of WP7 customers are ‘satisfied’ and 90 percent would recommend the platform to others. We don’t know details about the research, though — number of customers polled, time frame, so on.
• Average of 100 new apps in the Marketplace per day, and over 6,500 total are available right now.
• Most importantly, “over 2 million” licenses have been sold to OEMs around the world.

What does that tell us? Well, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: the iPhone 4 sold 3 million units in a little under a month after its launch, so Microsoft clearly has plenty of room to catch up — but that comes as no surprise to us, analysts, or Microsoft itself. Furthermore, selling a license to an OEM isn’t the same as selling a phone to a customer, since many of these manufactured devices are sitting on store shelves; it’s unclear exactly how many WP7 devices are actually in users’ pockets right now, but the number is certainly less than “over 2 million.”

Microsoft’s earnings call is tomorrow where we expect to get more detail on the platform’s performance, but the company is saying today that it sees plenty of reasons to be “bullish about the foundation for long-term success” here — and considering that they simply can’t afford to fail in the mobile game, we hope they’re right.

Microsoft: ‘over 2 million’ Windows Phone 7 licenses sold to manufacturers so far originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Embarrassing SMS misdirect bug on your Android device? Nexus S owners should start checking their phones now for an over-the-air update that’s supposed to fix the problem. It’s being rolled out gradually, so just be patient if it’s not there yet. How will we know the problem’s gone for good? We’ll just assume so until we find out otherwise, in some unfortunate manner.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Nexus S OTA 2.3.2 update rolling out now, your SMS relations will thank you originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s Q4 financial results press release contains a bombshell: as of April 4, co-founder Larry Page (on the far right, above) will replace Eric Schmidt as CEO and assume responsibility for day-to-day operations and product development and strategy. That doesn’t mean Schmidt is leaving — he’ll carry on as Executive Chairman and serve as an advisor to Page and co-founder Sergey Brin, focused on external things like “deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership.” As for Sergey, he’ll now “devote his energy to strategic projects, in particular working on new products,” with the simple title of Co-Founder.

Schmidt’s clarified and explained the change in a blog post, saying that the idea is to make leading Google as efficient as possible, and that “Larry, in my clear opinion, is ready to lead.” It’s clear the idea is to frame this as a simple organizational shuffle — Schmidt says that he, Brin, and Page “anticipate working together for a long time to come” — but there’s no question that Schmidt’s reign as CEO set a clear tone for Google as the company expanded beyond search and into new markets like smartphones, connected televisions, and operating systems, and we’re curious to see what Page’s style is like. We’re also very curious to hear more about why the change was made — although Schmidt, Page, and Brin have worked together for over 10 years, there’s always been some tension between the co-founders and their CEO, particularly over user privacy. In any event, this is a momentous change both for Google and the industry — we’ll see what happens next.

Larry Page taking over as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt will remain as Executive Chairman originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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