One of the most cherished Sony rumors surfaced again over the weekend, as Nikkei reported that the company is considering a cellphone and video game hybrid.

Rumor has it that Sony could bring together a project team as early as July to combine functions of an Ericsson phone with Sony’s gaming devices. Reuters, which spotted Nikkei’s article, didn’t use the “Playstation Phone” terminology, but that’s what everyone’s thinking. This is particularly interesting given that Sony refused to license the Playstation brand to Ericsson on a previous occasion because the technology wasn’t there.

So is the rumor true? It’s certainly not impossible, but all the retellings of this report missed an interesting tidbit from a week ago: Sony is already planning to integrate Playstation with an existing touch screen phone, the Satio.

Speaking at a press conference in Singapore, Hirokazu Ishizuka, head of Sony Ericsson’s Asia Pacific Region, said that “you can enjoy your PlayStation games so therefore this product is so powerful and we are very confident [of] this product’s success.” The report by ABS-CBN didn’t elaborate further except to say that gaming is part of a larger multimedia platform for the phone, which is due in about six months.

It’s not clear exactly what Ishizuka meant by his statement. We know the Satio’s PlayNow arena is a robust multimedia service, but it remains to be seen whether any Playstation branding will creep in.

ABS-CBN’s report would be perfect if Ishizuka was talking about the Aino, another Ericsson phone notable for its ability to remotely stream music and vidoes from a connected Playstation 3. Alas, we’ve got two phones that would for all intents and purposes be a Playstation Phone, if only they were mashed into one.

 
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Read more: Gaming, PlayStation, Sony, Sony Ericsson