The long-rumored hybrid pairing of a Sony PlayStation Portable and a cell phone has apparently been exposed over at Engadget, as photos of a prototype have surfaced that show what looks kind of like a PSPgo with a touch panel melded together with the Android operating system.  It's an early look at hardware that supposedly isn't quite finished yet, but the idea of it certainly is intriguing.  GameLife is as skeptical as anyone with good reason, mind you.  Here's Engadget:

It's hard to believe that what we're looking at is real -- but we assure you, the picture above is in fact the PlayStation Phone you've long been waiting for. As we reported back in August, the device you see is headed into the market soon, likely boasting Android 3.0 (aka Gingerbread), along with a custom Sony Marketplace which will allow you to purchase and download games designed for the new platform. The device snapped up top (and in our gallery below) is sporting a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 (a chip similar to the one found in the G2, but 200MHz faster), 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM, and the screen is in the range of 3.7 to 4.1 inches. Looking almost identical to the mockup we hit you with this summer, the handset does indeed have a long touchpad in the center which is apparently multitouch, and you can see in the photos that it's still bearing those familiar PlayStation shoulder buttons. For Sony buffs, you'll be interested to know that there's no Memory Stick slot here, but there is support for microSD cards.

The system specs go above and beyond what the current PSP can do, but it doesn't track with the PSP2 rumors from a few days ago, so it's unlikely that this is a PSP2/phone unit.  So what are we looking at here?  Is it a PSP that can place phone calls or a phone that can play PSP games?  Is it even real at all?  Sony isn't commenting on rumor and speculation, of course.  Leaked photos of a prototype and some hard technical numbers are neat and all, but I really think we need to hear about this gadget's intended market and place (if any) in the PlayStation family before anybody preorders anything.