A telephone consol from Sony?

While the iPhone dreams of becoming the ideal games consol for casual gamers, the celebrated Sony consol may be about to turn into a consol-smartphone.

After having made music portable by creating the Walkman 30 years ago, the Japanese manufacturer would desperately like to come up with another success story. While its mobile games consol, the PSP (far behind the DS with 50 million units sold as against 96 million) is doing pretty well, Sony can no longer ignore the arrival of two new clearly ambitious incursions on its gaming territory. These are the iPod Touch and the iPhone (40 million units sold in barely 2 years) which work with an accelerometer and in tandem with the AppStore, with great success among consumers. You have to say that there's no lack of titles, developers having no hesitation in betting on the success of Apple products. And the cost of these titles is far lower – even for the most expensive games – than those sold on a cartridge (average cost of 7 pounds against 30 pounds).

News came yesterday that Sony had set up a team dedicated to development of a hybrid device, somewhere between the PSP and the smartphone, with Sony-Ericsson involved of course.

Will Sony, far behind Apple in the market for digital music players, manage to pull back some ground with the PlaystationPhone?

> Buyer's Guides: Our Pick of The Best Products