The folks over at Engadget have acquired some photos of and details regarding the rumored Playstation Phone. With the release of this device Sony is rumored to be launching a gaming platform built on Android that would deliver PSP-level games to smartphones. Whether or not those games would be playable on other Android handsets remains to be seen and there are still a lot of questions about developer support. But, at the very least we know that it exists.

Up until now it was hearsay but this device is something that Sony is indeed working on and it is pretty far along in it’s development. I’d love to think that Sony will be to portable gaming what Amazon is to e-books, they might not have the best device per se but because they’re also on everyone else’s device they can be very successful even without selling a lot of devices.

Unfortunately, this is Sony. And, with their track record of proprietary hardware and software lock-ins I don’t have any faith that they will allow users to install they’re marketplace or games on other handsets.