Android 
Console Gamers everywhere were looking forward to the PlayStation phone, when rumors first began circulating about it. Anticipation grew even more as the leaks came around, and fans of Sony’s Playstation all began to seriously consider the new ‘Gaming Phone‘.
Released as the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, the phone is the first ‘Playstation Certified‘ phone, boasting exclusive games for it, with dedicated gamer controls, and access to Original Playstation, and Playstation 2 titles (eventually) in the future. The ‘Playstation Pocket‘ Game Store itself comes with about 50 games at launch, which isnt too bad at all.
Nokia fans will remember that the Finnish Giant themselves tried their hands at this, with the infamous N-Gage, the phone, and later the service. As we all know, that didnt work out too well for Nokia, who quietly swept it under the rug as number dropped. There were a few dedicated fans of the ‘Gamer phone‘ though, and I was one of them. Which is why I was especially excited to get my hands on Sony’s attempt at this mobile space.
So what do we have here? There’s a Playstation Controller/Gamepad that slides-out from under a 4 Inch Multi-touch capable Capacitive LCD Touchscreen, sort of like the PSP Go (which itself is discontinued now). Some of the main features of the Xperia Play include:
But that all being said, it does have its disadvantages, like:
So it cant compete with the latest flagship models from all the competitors out there, but its good enough for daily usage. Especially when it comes to Mobile Gaming. Face it, everyone has a smartphone these days, and everyone has tiny gaps in their daily schedule that they would like to fill. Be it the hour long travel to your workplace, the ride back from school, the 5 hour long flight for business. Which is why Mobile Games have been making a killing in sales nowadays. Games are usually optimized for touch-screen input, and range from the fairly simple to the more elaborate, the success of which depend on how well the Touchscreen controls are (I mean have you played Street Fighter on any Touchscreen device? Ugh). The Xperia Play is aiming to fit right into the gap in that section, having proper required hardware keys, and tactile feedback thrown in, to make your mobile gaming experience even better.
The Retail Package:
The Xperia Play includes a compact charger adapter, which connects to the microUSB connectivity cable to charge the device. There’s also an in-ear type headset, 8GB microSD card inside, and a couple quick start manuals and documentation.
You can check out our Sony Ericsson Xperia Play Unboxing post for more details on this section.
The Dedicated Gaming Controls:
The Xperia Play is designed to be comfortable in two-handed usage.
The corners of the device, and the back are tapered so that when you hold it in landscape mode, it fits the ‘mould’ of your hand, as such.
When its not in landscape though, it does feel a bit chunky at 119 x 62 x 16mm. Still smaller than it’s PSP Go brethren though. And at 175 grams it’s also a bit heavy for one handed use.
But the weight seems well balanced enough so that you can firmly and comfortably hold and grip the device when you’re playing on it with both hands. You get used to using it in one-handed use though, its not all that bad. Clearly the designers here went for ‘comfortable hold’ during instead of small size. That is a wise decision, in our opinion, since your index finger and thumbs have to move around very quickly while playing a game.
That being said, they should have gone for something more grippier as the back panel, instead of the glossy plastic used.
The slider is spring assisted, slides out very smoothly, and locks into place very firmly. Slick. Both halves of the phone hence remain in a very stable open position.
The Game Controls include dedicated gaming keys modeled after the Sony Playstation’s DualShock Controllers, having four types of controls here.
The Directional keys are on the left, and the action keys are on the right.
Both are placed into two recessed circle indentations, so that the keys dont interfere with the slider.
They stand-out enough that you can use them comfortably.
There are also two analog touchpads here, which are supposed to work as the Analog Sticks in a DualShock Controller.
They’re not too large, and you wont really get any precision out of them, so we barely used them.
On the top side of the phone, you’ll see the large L and R Trigger keys which are nicely positioned under your forefingers when the phone’s held in landscape mode. Along with all of that, you have the ‘Start’ and ‘Select’ keys along with a menu key (which lets you get to the game settings), which are small enough to never get in your way when you’re playing.
The Design and Construction:
One look at the Xperia Play, and you’ll definitely recognize the Sony Ericsson Styling, which is also used by other SE devices like the Neo.
The nice rounded top and bottom, with the curved back. Who else makes phones like these, eh?
Since we’ve already talked about the Display, below the 4 Inch screen, you’ll find the standard set of Android keys which are: Back, Home, Menu and a Dedicated Search key.
All keys have good feedback to them when pressed, but are not backlit, which means they might be hard to tell apart at night, in low lit situations. As usual, above the display, you have the Earpiece at the center, and a front facing camera for video calls. On the right of it, is a proximity sensor and ambient light sensor.
On the right side of the Xperia Play, you’ll find the L and R Trigger buttons.
You’ll also notice a volume rocker located in the middle of the two.
The rocker key is quite thin, and hard to use because of its positioning.
Disappointing you cannot use the R trigger button as a Camera key of sorts either.
On the left side of the Xperia Play, you have the 3.5mm Audio Jack, and microUSB port.
We prefer having the 3.5mm Audio jack at the top of a device, but no complaints really.
At the top, you have the Power key which doubles up as a screenlock key.
It’s pretty small so you wont hit it accidentally, and also has a nice tiny LED charging indicator there.
The bottom of the Xperia play only has a tiny inlet for a lanyard cable.
Y’know, if you still like to use lanyard cables.
When you turn it around, you’ll find a 5 Megapixel Camera and LED Flash on the curved back panel.
You might also notice the Dual Stereo Loudspeakers located on the tapered edged, so that the sound doesnt get muffled. There’s also a secondary microphone here too.
When you take the back cover off, the Xperia Play automatically unmounts the memory card thanks to a tiny case opening tip wire that acts as a detector. It’s quite sensitive though, and if you havent closed the back panel properly enough, the XPlay will keep mounting and unmounting your memory card which can be mildly annoying.
As a quick sidenote, the Xperia Play comes with an 8GB microSD card in-box, but you can plonk in cards as high as 32GB in there too. Underneath the 1500 mAh battery, you’ll find the SIM card slot. The battery is quoted at going for about 400 Hours of Standby time, with 8 Hours of Talktime in 2G (6 Hours in 3G).
The play as you’ll notice, is a very nicely balanced device but its clearly designed for only one purpose, and that is landscape gaming. As such, the thickness and shape work in its favour. And the build quality is pretty great, too.
The Android Gingerbread OS, and Sony Ericsson’s Touch-ups:
Sony Ericsson’s Android Smartphones are finally at par with the competition this year. Well, atleast when it comes down to Software. The Xperia Play is the third Gingerbread powered Sony Ericsson Smartphone after the Xperia Arc and Xperia Neo. The Mediascape UI of last year’s devices have been pruned out, and replaced with a customized version of the Gingerbread UI, with the Timescape UI.
What does that all mean? Well Sony Ericsson’s added in their own tweaks and customizations to Android’s Gingerbread UI, but its more of a polishing than a drastic UI. This is a good thing because it means future Android Updates will come along faster.
As always, you get five homescreens to fill up with widgets.
You can pinch to zoom out on any homescreen pane, to see an overview of all your widgets currently used, a feature that other manufacturers also use in their Android offerings.
There’s a custom Playstation pocket widget which shows your Playstation games and allows you to purchase more (we’ll detail this out later below).
And ofcourse, Android’s famous pull-down notification bar is still present, with the Sony Ericsson version displaying your recent events, running apps, active connections, and active downloads.
Unfortunately it doesnt have quick toggles for Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, etc but there’s a dedicated Widget for that available.
And like other Android devices nowadays, the Xperia Play supports Live Wallpapers, having the usual selections including one exclusive ‘Playstation’ one.
There are two docked icons on either side of the launcher key, which can be edited to display a single icon or a folder of icons. Creating folders is easy enough (and very iOS-ish), just drag one icon over another, and a folder will pop up with options.
Tapping the launcher will take you to the main menu, where you’ll see two shortcuts in the bottom sides of the screen.
On the left, you can sort your icons by Automatic options like Most used, Alphabetical, or recently installed, or manually move the icons around.
Text selection is also a lot easier on Gingerbread, where you now have two large pointers that appear went you tap a word, which can be dragged to make a selection of words, followed up by cut, copy and paste options.
We also ran a benchmark on the Xperia Play, and the results were not too suprisinging (it would have been awesome a year ago). The 1Ghz Snapdragon Qualcomm MSM8255 processor, Adreno 205 graphics chip, and 512MB of RAM managed to get a better score than the Nexus One and the Samsung Galaxy S, but nowhere near the Galaxy S2 and LG Optimus 2X.
Performance isnt an issue though, with the UI being smooth, having no lag even with multiple apps running. It’s certainly not ‘slow‘, and does pretty well at gaming, without struggling to run any of the pre-installed games (though sometimes you might need a restart to get the framerates back up).
The Phonebook and Contacts:
Android has a pretty good phonebook app, with almost unlimited storage for your contacts, tons of integration with social networks going around, and is in an easy-to-navigate UI.
At the top, you have a search box to find a specific contact, and on the right side you have an alphabet list that you can scroll through, to get to a certain letter that a first name would start with, and at the bottom, you have shortcuts to the dialer, call log, and favorites.
You can sync multiple accounts including Exchange and selectively hide or show contacts from certain accounts. If you want to only display contacts with phone numbers, you can choose to do so, which might help folks with Google accounts full of contact email addresses.
And if a contact has more than one account, you can merge them, which is super useful when they have a Facebook, Twitter and other accounts.
And once you find a contact in the phonebook, you can tap on the photo to get shortcuts to call, text, email, or more (depending on what fields the contacts have). Each contact can have a whole bunch of different types of fields added in, and the plus sign and x mark buttons let you add or remove fields. There’s also a personalized ringtone option, and the ability to redirect calls straight to voicemail.
You can also ‘favourite‘ a contact which makes that person appear in the Gmail app too, under ‘starred in Android’, so you can quickly email them.
Messaging, Email and Text Input:
Messaging on Android is pretty simple, with all text messages sorted into a conversation view, with the latest message at the bottom, and the oldest at the top and you can also lock certain messages to make sure they cant be deleted.
Creating an MMS is also simple enough. You just have to tap the ‘add‘ button next to the writing box to add images, audio, video, etc.
You can search through conversations to find specific messages, and delivery reports for text messages. Annoyingly though, the text box only shows three lines so typing out a long message can be very frustrating.
On the Email side of things, there’s a Gmail App that allows for multiple emails to be deleted, labeled, archived, etc.
There’s no unified inbox unfortunately, but there’s support for multiple Gmail accounts.
Emals appear just like you’d see them in your desktop version of Gmail.
There’s also another generic email app for other email accounts that can handle other POP or IMAP inboxes, you have access to all online folders and local folders like inbox, sent items, etc.
An advantage of using the generic app, is that Sony Ericsson has a Preview Pane that can be expanded or collapsed and thumb scrolled. Coming to IM, there’s a Google Talk app that handles Google Talk, but is also compatible with iChat, Ovi Contacts, Pidgim and Kopete among other instant messaging services.
Moving onto Text input, since there’s no hardware keyboard, you have to depend on the Gingerbread on-screen QWERTY keyboard, with reasonably sized, well-spaced keys in portrait mode.
While in landscape mode the on-screen keyboard takes up almost the whole screen with large, easy to press keys.
We kept sliding open the Xperia Play for the first two days though, because you’re so used to having a Qwerty hardware keyboard slide out.
That habit took care of itself on the third day.
The Gallery:
SE have used the stock Android Gallery, with 3D looks and Transition effects, and solid functionality.
Images appears in an album/folder and when tapped on, sort themselves into a neat grid. The gallery also pulls in your picasa albums too, which you might either love or hate.
Your photos can be sorted by date in a timeline view too, if you prefer with a button on the top right corner. There’s also a date slider which can be used to find photos in a specific date.
You can swipe left or right when viewing a photo in fullscreen mode to go between previous/next images.
There’s multi-touch support pinch-to-zoom support or you can double tap or use the zoom in/out keys onscreen.
You cant zoom in too much though, as the gallery seems to show you a lower-resolution version of the image. For speed reasons, perhaps?
You can crop, rotate and edit images right from the gallery.
And there’s quick sharing available to Email, Facebook, Bluetooth, MMS or Picasa.
The Video Player:
The Xperia Play only supports 3GP and MP4 video formats unfortch. No DivX or Xvid support out-of-the-box. Pity because the large 4 Inch screen is quite nice to watch videos on.
Thankfully there are a ton of video player apps on the Android market that do, so its not that bad.
The Music Player:
The Xperia Play has a pretty good interface for its Music player, with four tabs for all artists, all tracks, playlists and albums.
As you’d expect, the ‘Now Playing’ screen offers all the standard set of music controls, with a shortcut to the library and the ability to look up a song or album on Youtube, or even SE’s Play Now Arena.
Unfortunately there’s no Visualization options, apart from the Album Art, but we never thought you really needed that on a mobile phone anyway, unless you really want to drain that battery quickly.
There are also several equalizer options available to tinker with.
Audio Quality is decent too, with a good dynamic range, loudness and noise levels that are probably one of the best we’ve heard.
The Telephone:
The ‘phone’ part of the Playstation Phone handles the department quite well. No troubles holding on to a signal, and in-call quality was good. There’s Active noise cancellation too, thanks to the second microphone on the back, and hence Ambient Noise is filtered out so that the person on the other end of your call, can hear you clearly. The proximity sensor at the top of the screen turns off the display during calls, when you place the phone near your ear.
Strangely, we couldnt find a Smart Dial option, but there is a voice dialing homescreen widget.
The loudspeaker is louder than most Android phones, but not as loud as Nokia’s latest devices. Somewhat on par with the iPhone.
The Camera:
The Xplay has a 5 Megapixel Camera (2592?1944 resolution images) with a single LED Flash. There’s also image stabilization and geo-tagging options.
Unfortunately there’s no touch-to-focus for some weird reason, which means in some occasions you cant exactly focus on what you want. Since there’s no dedicated camera key either, so you cant pre-focus on an object before taking a picture.
Some of the gaming keys work in camera mode though, like the ‘X’ button acts as a shutter key, and the ‘O’ button acts as a back key, with the Menu key bringing up a list of options. Options are limited to just focusing mode, scene modes, color effects, and picture size. There is no ISO setting unfortch.
Image quality-wise it isnt the best 5 Megapixel Camera out there but it deffo isnt the worst. There’s not as much details as the competition but there’s a good contrast and colors, and a reasonably low amount of noise. But since it’s Autofocus you can get some pretty good Macro shots too. There’s a couple camera image samples from the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (Remember to click on the image for the full resolution version):
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Video is recorded at WVGA resolution at 30 fps. It’s a shame that the Play doesnt have 720p High Def video recording capabilities like the rest of the high-end mobile phones these days, but hey it’s supposed to be focused on Gaming, remember?
The camcorder UI is basically the same as the image camera ui, and videos are smooth, with good colors and somewhat low detail. Good enough, we suppose.
Here’s a couple camera video samples from the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play:-
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Video 2:
The Connectivity:
The Xperia Play has a whole bunch of connectivity options. From the Quad-Band GSM and Wifi, DLNA support, USB v2.0, 3.5mm Audio Jack and Bluetooth v2.1, it boasts a load of options.
There’s no HDMI port though, which seems like a missed opportunity. Imagine sending your games from your Xperia Play to your High Def TV. There’s not even standard TV-Out unfortunately. There’s only 400MB of internal storage though, but there’s an 8GB microSD included in the retail package.
The Web Browser:
The Updated Gingerbread Browser on the Xperia Play is very capable, especially since it has Flash 10.2 Support.
One a website loads, the URL bar is all you see, with a bookmark button.
When you pan around or zoom in, that disappears and you have the entire screen available.
You can even use the gaming hardware keys to navigate around.
Standard moving, selection, panning around, that sort of thing, with “X” selecting links and “O” being the back button.
If you need to get to the options again, just hit the menu key and you can open a new tab, switch between open tabs, refresh the page or go back/forward and save/open bookmarks.
You can also copy text from the page, find on page, etc. The bookmark page hows you a thumbnail list of your bookmarked pages, with a most visited list under another tab, and a history list.
Like we mentioned earlier, there’s also full Flash support with Adobe Flash 10.2 player, so youtube videos play quite well provided they’re under 480p. Same for Flash games.
Not to mention, there’s also a dedicated Youtube App available if needed.
The Office and Organizing features:
The Xperia Play has a couple Office-relayed apps pre-installed. There’s Officesuite which can view most office documents like Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF, but to edit any of them you’ll need to buy the full version.
There’s also integration with the Gmail App so that you can quickly attach emails and send them.
There’s a Calendar App, with an Agenda View, and also Daily, Weekly and Monthy views.
Adding a new event is as easy and straightforward as you’d imagine, even featuring alarm reminders.
The doc viewer integrates with the Gmail app, which makes viewing attachments a cinch. You can’t download them to the phone’s internal memory however. Attaching all kinds of files is possible though. And ofcourse, there’s a calculator app, with nice big keys to use.
The calculator app also has Sin, Cos and Tan functions, which should be helpful to some folks out there.
There’s an Alarm clock app also, which allow you to set an almost unlimited amount of alarms, with start and repeat times.
Strangely though there’s no Timer, Stopwatch or World time apps pre-installed, or a Voice recorder.
But yes, you can download all of these from the Android Market.
GPS Navigation and Google Maps:
The GPS receiver on the Xperia Play got a lock in a couple minutes without the A-GPS. With A-GPS switched on, it got a lock under a minute.
As you can imagine, this being an Android phone and all, Google Maps is the main app for your navigation needs. If you’re in a supported country, you’ll get full turn-by-turn navigation, and street view. If you arnt, you still have the basic set of features and can pinch-to-zoom & double-tap your way around satellite and terrain maps. There’s two finger rotation, tilting and 3D buildings (where available) and more in Google Maps v5.0 on the Play, which is definitely a nice thing.
There’s also a digital compass which makes things a little easier. Again, there’s tons of navigation apps on the Android Market if Google’s maps dont do it for ya.
The Android Market:
The Android Market App is quite simple to use, even at first glance. There’s a carousel of featured apps at the top, with three buttons for the Applications section, Games and a ‘Sony Ericsson’ section (which is the ‘My Apps’ section in non-se android phones), and a search option at the top.
Like most App Stores nowadays, the App and Game sections are divided into sub-sections so that you can narrow down the search for apps that might be more relevant for ya.
There are all kinds of apps, and gazillions of them all ranging from file managers, to entertainment apps, and so on.
The Playstation Games:
Sony Ericsson boasted at launch, that the Xperia Play would deliver more than 50 games. Most of these arnt new games, but they’re optimized for the gaming controls.
The first (and currently only) Playstation Game that’s pre-installed on the Xperia play is Crash Bandicoot, which is also displayed in the Playstation Pocket widget.
The game makes use of all the hardware controls and runs brilliantly on the phone with no lags whatsoever. Nice.
We felt right at home with the playstation buttons on the right and the directional keypad on the left. But we have to admit, we barely used the virtual control sticks at all.
There’s more Playstation games available to buy and download, but its only a handful right now, with Cool Boaders 2, Jumping Flash, MediEvil and Destruction Derby 2. At £3.99 each they’re reasonably pricey for nostalgic gaming too.
Next up, there’s Bruce Lee: Dragon Warrior which is an Xperia-Play exclusive game (but not a Playstation game) that has only made appearances on Bada and iOS, with a HD version for the iPad.
In the sports department, we have FIFA 2010 installed, which is identical to its iPhone and Android versions, but seems to work much better on the Xperia play thanks to some tweaks (probably), and the hardware controls.
There’s also the Sims 3, if you’re into the franchise.
There’s also Star Battalion pre-installed where you’re a space pilot fighting against evil alien overlords, and makes great use of the gaming keys on the Xperia Play.
Dont forget, if you’re looking for some real nostalgia, you can always install the PSX4Droid Android App to get some Playstation 1 Games emulated on the Xperia Play, which work out pretty brilliantly thanks to the controls. Just fyi. And there are tons of popular Android Games that you could play on the Xperia Play too, just that some of them might not be optimized to work with the gaming keys.
Provided Sony Ericsson port more Playstation games over we might see game developers start to favour Android over iOS, especially if a certain rumor about there being more ‘Playstation certified’ phones coming, is true. Strangely missing out though, is any form of integration with the Playstation network (PSN) from both the Playstation pocket app, and the Xperia Play app. It could definitely also use a couple more Multiplayer games as well. Here is a video demo of the games and gameplay on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play:
For now, the Xperia Play suffers from the same problems that N-Gage did. That was, why would developers want to make games for one phone, when they can instead use that time to make it for an entire platform. There also arnt enough launch titles (though we must re-iterate that it’s still early on), and the hardware doesnt seem to be anything too extra-ordinary. But with 20 Game publishers signed up to make games for the thing, including Playstation, EA, Namco Bandai, Glu, Gameloft, Unity, Handy Games, Trendy Entertainment and Digital Chocolate, we cant help but feel slightly optimistic that the Xperia Play might be able to hold its own on the gaming front eventually.
Just to give you a better idea of the Xperia Play, here’s a video overview:
The Conclusion:
The Xperia Play is made for gaming, and not to be a flagship device. As such, it’s spec list isnt as spec-tacular as the Xperia Arc. It might be very well, one of the easiest phones to recommend for die-hard Playstation Fans out there, or Gamers who want to keep at it while on the bus, or waiting for a plane, and such. It’s a pretty fun smartphone, and there just simply isnt any better phone to comfortably play games on right now.
But wait, it’s not that simple, is it? You’re paying so much that you’d probably want your phone to be capable of doing other things too. So we think we’ve come to a good enough conclusion for ya.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, is basically half PSP-Go, and half Smartphone, with a dedicated gamepad. What you have to be absolutely sure about, is that game pad.
If you’re serious about it, then by all means go on and pick up an Xperia Play for yourself.
But if you have even the slightest hint of a second thought, there are other phones that do more things for that kind of money, but admittedly, miss out on that gamepad, which does put the Xperia play in a league of it’s own, with no real direct competition.
The Xperia Arc, for instance, has a much larger, better Reality Display screen, 8 Megapixel Camera with full HD Video recording. Then there’s the Motorola Atrix, and LG Optimus 2X with it’s Dual Cores and hence much faster over all performance.
But y’know that those devices are missing? Yeah, you guessed it, the Game Pad. So just how important is that for you, Gamer?
Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile and mobile-related accessories.
Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus 
or on Facebook or Twitter: Follow @clintonjeff
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