It could happen, but patents are filed all the time for stuff which never comes to light.

Patents usually show a generic design to illustrate the points the patent is meant to cover. After the designers have at it, any PSP phone is likely to look dramatically different.

Anyway a PSP phone would be an awesome beast. It's going to have to use storage instead of UMD so I wonder what that means for existing PSP owners. If Sony have sense, they'll produce a UMD dock where you can sync games to the phone in some way.

Who is this aimed at?

For most gamer type games a touch screen control pad would be awful, vibrating feedback or not. For casual games the price is likely to be too high.

Is the thing going to have a big screen for decent graphics and be too big for a phone or is it going to be a pocket sized phone with a screen too small to game with?

Will it be backwards compatable to the current PSP and need a UMD drive making it bulky and a battery hog or will everyone have to buy their games all over again?

It looks to be the n-gage all over again to me.

Well thats innovative!

All well and good for 'relatively' slow GUI access - works great on the iPhone for this very reason.

But in a games console/phone combo? I'm not sure, I would wager the touchscreen wouldn't provide the tactile feedback which a normal -raised- pushbutton provides, which is quite important.

Might be able to get used to it I suppose, it would indeed solve the sizing mismatch between traditional mobile phone and PSP forms.

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@DrXym - thats not the device shape they're patenting, but just the screen, the pics demonstrate the on screen switchover capability between phone and games console and associated touch locations.

Uses a 3G/Wifi connection to stream adult-entertainment right onto your handheld?

I'd like the check, and my coat please.

I've had the NES emulator on the Ipod Touch and its absolutely dire, you can't play it cos u have to concentrate on making sure you are pressing the on screen buttons rather than the game itself