Sony has their Playstation Portable handheld gaming device.

The company also has Walkman portable media players.

Sony also manufactures mobile phones through their collaboration with Ericsson.

Sony Ericsson has already combined Walkman and Mobile Phones to launch Walkman branded mobile devices.

The company is now considering launching a PSP based mobile device to further enhance their product range.

The target would of course be the Apple iPhone which has now become a potent mobile gaming device.

Japanese Nikkei business daily has reported that the company aims to start working on such a device pretty soon so that they do not lose more time to become a major player in the mobile phone gaming segment.

Electric Playground has reported that videogame publisher Electronic Arts is killing one of their most popular videogame franchise Need for Speed.

The report said that all the future titles in the series have been canceled.

EA director of communications Colin Macrae had this to say on the reports: “We’re working through a process on people, products, and facilities at EA and don’t have any announcements today.”

Need for Speed has been one of the most popular gaming series ever and still manages to gain impressive sales. But recent titles have not been very profitable for the company.

It remains to be seen if EA would be cutting jobs in the company looking at the slowing down economy.

Checkout: Electric Playground

Market sources are saying that MTV Networks’ Rock Band videogame series has gained rights to the Beatles songs.

This could be a major victory for the company as they compete with Activision.

The news could become official as soon as today as MTV is likely to come out with an announcement.

Aerosmith, Metallica, AC/DC are already licensing their music to the Rock Band series of music related games.

Beatles have been pretty hard to get as they have yet to license their music to any of the digital media stores.

Apple has been trying hard to get their music on the Apple iTunes store but they have failed till now.

Checkout: Beatles License Songs to Viacom Videogame Unit

Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter has said in a research note that Nintendo could just launch a new handheld gaming console before the end of this year.

This seems very unlikely because Nintendo DS continues to do very well in all the markets it is in.

Sony Playstation Portable has however caught on in some of the major markets though both the devices continue to sell in high numbers.

He said: “We think that the timing of a new product introduction will depend upon the sales profile for the DS, and believe that lower than expected DS hardware sales could trigger an earlier launch for the new device.”

Pachter added: “DS sales are solid worldwide, but are weak in Japan, leading us to expect an introduction of a new device in Japan before the end of the calendar year.”