Sony has announced a new Xperia event for next week, which will be targeted at “Pro gamers and streamers”. Could the PlayStation Phone be back?
The Sony Xperia Twitter account just posted the a tweet promising an “exciting announcement” to be streamed from the Sony Xperia YouTube page on September 12 at 13:00 Japan time (05:00 UK time).
We don’t know exactly what it’ll entail, but we do know that it’s an Xperia smartphone-related product. The above teaser video shows a gamer playing a game on what appears to be a smartphone, and wearing what seems to be a set of Sony’s gaming headphones.
Could we be in line to receive a gaming-focused Xperia PlayStation Phone? Is this the return of the PlayStation Phone concept?
The last attempt at an Xperia-branded PlayStation phone didn’t go so well, though we still retain a fair amount of affection for 2011’s Sony Ericsson Xperia Play with its excellent slide-out controls.
The lack of PlayStation branding in this teaser might suggest that Sony isn’t quite ready to capitalise on its games console heritage in the smartphone space, but we live in hope. We haven’t seen a new Sony portable gaming machine since the revised PlayStation Vita model hit the global market in 2014.
Sony has been increasing its focus on streaming in smartphones lately, with Remote Play giving you the ability to stream PS4/PS5 games to your smartphone.
Sony has teamed up again with Backbone to launch the Backbone One PlayStation Edition. It is a special edition the Backbone One smartphone control with its intuitive streaming-focused user interface. This was an iOS-only event, but Sony may have something similar for Android.