Get Ready to Work and Play

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play showing off its familiar PlayStation buttons

A great phone for gamers – it’s able to deliver a fabulous gaming experience and yet the Play doesn’t forget it’s a phone too.

What We Like

Sony Ericsson has come up with a fantastic phone for all of us PlayStation devotees – the Xperia Play, with slide-out gaming controls and Google’s Android operating system.

Although not the slimmest of phones; it does, after all, house those all-important slide-out controls, it still fit into our pockets and isn’t too heavy.  It feels comfortable to hold, too, which is vitally important because you will be holding this phone a lot!

The controls will be familiar to anyone who has used a PlayStation before; there are D-pad direction buttons to the left of the keypad, and the four PlayStation buttons – square, cross, triangle and circle, are on the right.  Two touch-sensitive pads sit in the centre, and there are two shoulder buttons behind the phone for your index fingers to rest on while you’re gaming.

This all resulted in very comfortable play. The buttons are well designed, and we found them to be very quick to respond.  We were also impressed by the trackpads; we were a little apprehensive about how they would compare to the proper analogue sticks but soon discovered they were a great substitute.
 
We managed to get about five hours of gameplay before we had to re-charge the battery, which, considering the demands we made on it we didn’t think was bad.

After all that playing, we almost forgot that this isn’t just a gaming device, it’s actually a phone too, and like all the Xperia range, this one is running Google’s Android Gingerbread 2.3.  It also has a rear-facing, five-megapixel camera and a VGA camera on the front for video.  We were impressed by the Play’s display, too; the screen is 4 inches with a resolution of 854 x 480 pixels, and is sharp and colourful so great for gaming.  There is also Flash support, so you can access the multitude of Flash videos online, and naturally, you can download apps from the Android Market, thousands of them for free.
 
Internal storage is 400MB, but the Play comes with an 8GB microSD, so you can fill it with games, photos and music. 

What We Don't Like

We were a little disappointed that the Play only has a 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM because there are other phones with faster processors.  On the whole though, it didn’t actually make any difference apart from the very occasional stutter.

We definitely weren’t happy with not being able to play our own PlayStation games on this handset.  All games have to be downloaded from PlayStation Suite, the online games shop for Android, but there is a vast choice, including old PSP and PSOne games. 

Conclusion

This is definitely an exciting phone for gamers, though maybe not for the partners or parents of gamers who are likely to see even less of them than before once they get their thumbs on this phone.