Android Tablet Update

Sony took the stage at E3 tonight and while they mostly stuck to all things PS3 (seriously, more Move content?) they did manage to slip in a little bit of Android relevant news.

The PlayStation Suite was first announced in January of last year and aimed to bring PlayStation level gaming to additional manufacturers.

The SDK for the PlayStation Suite was just released in April and Sony hopes that developers will use it to deliver original quality content for PlayStation Certified devices. They claim that response to it has been “nothing short of phenomenal,” we’ll see what that amounts to in terms of available titles soon enough.

Sony’s announcements today were that the PlayStation Suite program is being renamed to PlayStation Mobile in order to better reflect the mobility of PlayStation and secondly that HTC is going to be the first non-Sony partner that will bring the PlayStation experience to their hardware. This was rumored back in February to be coming at Mobile World Congress, but apparently Sony saw fit to hold on to it until now.

What exactly the partnership means isn’t clear, the example hardware used in their slides was the HTC One X, but no timeline for PlayStation Mobile to roll out on HTC handsets was given.

Sony promised that they will have many more PlayStation Certified phones this year so we should be hearing plenty more about this going forward and hopefully other manufacturers are coming on board.

Despite a fair amount of hype leading up to its announcement the PlayStation phone and subsequent PlayStation Suite efforts have not exactly lived up to the expectations of fans. I used an Xperia Play for a couple weeks and was completely underwhelmed by the hardware and the games that were available at that time. With that said, I hope Sony has taken the early criticism to heart and it’s encouraging to hear that other manufacturers are signing on to the program.

Do you think Sony can turn the newly christened PlayStation Mobile program around and leverage it to deliver compelling content for Android?

Update: Sony sent out a brief press release after this posted. The only new information is that the HTC devices that are initially joining the list of PlayStation Certified devices are the “HTC One series of smartphones, HTC One X, HTC One S, and HTC One V.”