This Whole PSP2 Thing Is Huge

Seriously huge. While the PSP2 itself is pretty big news (for several reasons) I think the bigger news is the PlayStation Suite. With the PlayStation Suite we're seeing Sony do something that I don't think any of us thought could do at all, much less pull off with the full support of the entertainment division.
In a nutshell the exciting thing about the PSS is the legitimate games that it's going to bring to a platform (Android) that is in dire need of some impressive games. While it's clear that the current major player in the mobile gaming space is the iOS platform this announcement could see that changing in the next two to three years. If you take an informal pole of "gamers" (I hate that term) and ask them about gaming on iOS a couple of things emerge: there are a lot of games, a lot of them are really good, but complex game controls suck.
I don't think that there's any argument to be made against this. What has been the most exciting Apple gaming news in the part 3 months? The actual release of the iPad arcade controls and the stick-on-your-screen capacitive joysticks. That's right, the most exciting news has been physical controls for a platform that will never, ever, have physical controls.


That's what's so great about the PSS coming to Android. What makes Android potentially bad, specifically the fragmentation and different UI expectations, is a huge strength when it comes to gaming. This means that we're going to see manufacturers that have been making world class slab phones create equally impressive phones with physical controls that are worth a damn. Sony Ericsson is kicking this off; I'd be surprised if this didn't become popular within the next two years.
But that's not all. Sony isn't the only company that's going to be making money off of this; we're going to see a plethora of 3rd party companies creating games that utilize the now available physical controls. At the very, very least we're going to see some great NES/SNES/N64 emulators on Android phones. And there's nothing that Sony can do to prevent people from installing these games on the PlayStation phone. Chalk one up for Android.
On a smaller note: I think it's very telling that Sony is moving the PSP2 onto ARM architecture, specifically the Cortex-A9. This is a big turning point in console gaming. For the longest time console makers created custom chips for their machines. This started to change a bit with the original XBox when Microsoft specified a modified Celeron chip would power their machine; it continued with the tri-core Power chip IBM made for the 360, and the much touted Cell chip that went into the PS3. As much as these were cores made from then-current computing designs, nothing comes as close as the PSP2.
The PSP2 is now, essentially, a super-powered mobile device in the same class as a next-gen Android or iPhone. That's exciting, and it shows you the incredible growth that is happening in the mobile space. Soon enough (24 months), we'll all have phones capable of playing PSP2 games. Welcome to the future friend.