Sony’s Playstation Portable (the PSP) hasn’t exactly been as successful as Sony would have wanted it to be and a serious re-design may be in the offing. This redesign may include a touchscreen on the handheld gaming device along with traditional hardware controls.
According to an interview of Kazuo Hirai, the head of Sony’s Gaming division, by the New York Times, Kazuo hinted at a future PSP with both touchscreen and hardware controls. While Hirai clearly stated during the interview that Sony would still be catering to dedicated gaming fans, it’s difficult not to acknowledge the emergence of casual gaming on smartphones as being that’s affected Sony. Considering that a game like Angry Birds, which uses only touch based controls, has already been downloaded 50 million times, it would be pretty hard for Sony ignore such a massive number of people interested in playing games on a handheld device.
Currently, the Sony PSP is far behind the Nintendo DS with only 62 million units sold as compared to the DS’ 135 million units.
via The New York Times