After all the rumours surrounding the forthcoming possible launch a PlayStation smartphone, it may transpire that the device will only actually emerge on the market sometime in April, 2011, which will almost coincide with the roll-out of Nintendo 3DS portable game system.

“Sony Ericsson is going big on this one, but although it will get a February launch, it won’t be in shops until April," an anonymous source told Pocket-lint web-site.

Previously it was rumoured that Sony Ericsson, mobile phone joint venture between Ericsson and Sony, would at least demonstrate the PlayStation smartphone in early December. Perhaps, the company indeed unveiled the novelty behind closed doors, but since there were no leaks afterwards, this can be neither confirmed nor denied. Based on current rumours, not only there are no plans to unveil the handset at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, but the unveiling in February at the Mobile World Congress 2011 will only be formal with actual sales beginning in April.

Not a lot is known about the SE PS phone. Based on the information revealed earlier, the first ever PlayStation phone will resemble PSP Go portable game console, but will feature Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8655 system-on-chip clocked at 1.0GHz, 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM and so on. The smartphone that will reportedly be based on heavily customized version of Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" operating system will feature 3.7" - 4.1" screen similar to that of PSPgo. The hardware inside the Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone will be vastly different from that inside PlayStation Portable and it is unclear which games will it support.

It is currently projected that Nintendo intends to start sales of its next-generation 3DS portable platform in March, 2011. As a result, it is possible to consider the PlayStation phone as a spoiler for Nintendo's launch as well as Sony's rival for competing mobile console.

Tags: Sony, Playstation, PSP, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm, Snapdragon