Sony Ericsson appears poised to introduce an Android 3.0 gaming platform phone according to an exclusive scoop at Engadget,

Here’s what we can tell you about the hardware: if you’re a gaming fan, this is exactly the kind of phone you’ve been waiting for. The device is described as cross between the Samsung Captivate and the PSP Go—in other words, it’s a landscape slider with game controls in place of the typical QWERTY keyboard. The D-pad is here, but instead of the small joystick, the device will have what was described as a “long touch pad” for analog controls, along with standard PSP buttons and shoulder buttons. The phone has a large display, described as being between 3.7 and 4.1 inches with WVGA or better resolution, a 5 megapixel camera that we’re told might not be final, and it’ll likely have a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU on board. The phone is mostly black with some silver highlights, and the gamepad area is white / silver in color.

Google has already been a long-time fan of entering the gaming market and with companies like Sony jumping on the Android bandwagon it will help them extend that feature set greatly. Apparently the gaming handset will be running Gingerbread (Android 3.0) and have its own specific space in the Android Market for gaming apps.

“Games will be graphically in the range of PSX or PSP games…with God of War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and LittleBigPlanet possibly on tap, and future plans for titles which incorporate augmented reality features.” All of those games are huge hits even on the PSP, but what really caught my eye is the mention of augmented reality features. Phones enabled with cameras and GPS give a lot of space open for social gaming. Where the location of the user, or what the camera is pointing at, can affect the game world—overlaying game information and permitting interaction with other players of the game.

Being in a phone means that games will be able to take advantage of bandwidth and network and we should fully expect them to. Many gaming handsets nowadays are collapsed into themselves with only spartan connectivity, but the advent of a PlayStation phone could spark the arrival of a vast array of phone-specific gaming technologies and games. LittleBigPlanet exists primarily in an online realm and it would be really interesting to see it interact with a phone. Never being too far away from friends and the world building experience might prove to be a strange distraction on long bus commutes.

It looks like this handset could get introduced as early as October.  As we’ve seen with new digital download game trends and Facebook’s own swirling rumors around a game-dedicated phone, branded mobile devices specific to this industry is all the rage.  There’s plenty of room for development here, and we’re sure to see a lot of stuff being thrown at the wall as business models, distribution tactics, partnerships and platforms get weeded out.