Frankly, it’s a surprise it’s taken them this long. The idea of a PlayStation phone hasn’t been so much a persistent rumor as it has a cellular cloud hanging over both Sony and Sony Ericsson. It overshadowed the launch of the PSP Go and has been responsible for untold speculation about terse relations between the divisions. Throw in more pre-announce leaks than average, and the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play has quite the reputation to live up to. Can the first gaming-centric Android smartphone deliver both the polished day-to-day experience we now expect, and live up to the PlayStation branding? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Hardware
The family similarity between the PSP Go and the XPERIA Play is obvious. Both have a slide-out gaming keypad and a chubby little body: 119 x 62 x 16 mm for the Sony Ericsson, 128 x 69 x 16.5 mm for the Sony. Even so, Sony Ericsson manages to fit in a larger display, a 4-inch panel running at 854 x 480 resolution. Colors and viewing angles are fine, but brightness falls well short, being mediocre indoors and oftentimes unusable outside. That’s with the backlight set to maximum, too; there’s no auto-brightness option, though we can see that the XPERIA Play is indeed adjusting in relation to ambient light (cover the top section of the phone and the screen dims automatically).
Above the display is a front-facing VGA resolution camera and proximity sensor, while underneath are four frustratingly spongy buttons for back, home, menu and search. The power/lock button is on the top edge, while the 3.5mm headphones socket and microUSB port are on the left side, set into a slice of chrome-finish plastic. On the right side are the left and right gaming shoulder keys – more on which in a moment – and, centrally, a volume rocker; we consistently had trouble pressing the latter, thanks to their slightly recessed position and the tendency of the slide mechanism to open slightly with any pressure. On the back is a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash.
Of course, it’s the gaming controls that have prompted the most interest. Slide up the spring-loaded display – something that’s easy to do one-handed – and you find a D-pad, PlayStation-style face buttons (triangle, square, circle and cross), and two touch-sensitive analog controls that attempt to mimic the physical analog pads on a DualShock. On the bottom left is a second menu button (useful, since it means you needn’t reach up to tap the fascia key) while on the bottom right are select and start buttons.
The physical keys are good, nicely sprung and responsive, just as you’d hope. Sony Ericsson’s analog pads take a little more getting used to, however. The center dimple makes finding them without looking straightforward, but without a physical limit to how far we could move our thumb – as you’d get with a real stick – we sometimes found ourselves overshooting and slipping off the control altogether. As for the shoulder buttons, they’re bizarrely wobbly and flappy, though broad enough so that our fingers found them easily.
Build quality and hand-feel is a mixed bag. The slide is sold, and generally the XPERIA Play feels reassuringly weighty, but Sony Ericsson’s choice of plastics smacks of cost-cutting. The matte silver of the gamepad is sturdy and tactile, but the glossy black battery cover and screen surround feel cheap. While the tubby little chassis makes for a noticeable bulge in the pocket, it makes holding the XPERIA Play in landscape orientation for gaming more comfortable.
Under the hood it’s a pretty standard Android phone, with a single-core 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 processor, Adreno 205 graphics, 512MB of RAM, 400MB of internal storage and a bundled 8GB microSD card. Pop off the battery cover and there’s a 1,500 mAh pack along with the memory card slot and SIM slot; the latter two can be accessed without removing the battery, and the microSD is automatically unmounted when you remove the cover. Although you can pull the SIM without powering down the phone first, we did find we had to power-cycle anyway if we wanted the XPERIA Play to reconnect to the mobile network once we’d slotted it back in.
Connectivity includes quadband GSM/EDGE and then various configurations of UMTS/WCMDA depending on location; there’ll also be a CDMA version for Verizon. WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and of course microUSB 2.0 round out the main specs, along with some surprisingly effective stereo speakers.