Xperia Play
April 6th, 2011 | by Mobile Data Group |If you like playing video games on a smartphone but have been wishing you had an inbuilt controller then the “Playstation Phone”, aka the Xperia Play, is the portable device for you.
Sony Ericsson’s new hybrid smartphone and handheld game console is clearly targeted at a niche: those who play games.
The phone eliminates the need to carry a portable handheld game console like Sony’s PSP Go (which as of May 2010, according to GameSpot, had only sold between 20,000 and 25,000 since launch in Australia) and a smartphone. But don’t let that deter you from it; it’s also a neat mobile that runs Google’s latest mobile operating system, Android 2.3.2 (Gingerbread), making it not just a gaming platform.
As a smartphone, the Xperia Play operates as you would expect. It weighs 175 grams, has a 4-inch screen (480×854 resolution), 5.1 megapixel rear-facing camera and 1GHz processor. Memory wise, the phone only has 512MB onboard (400MB of which is available for apps to use). But with the included SD card, there is 8GB of space for storing data on. This can be upgraded to a 32GB card.
I particularly like the Twitter and Facebook integration via the Sony Ericsson Timescape app, which shows on the main screen an aesthetically pleasing view of all your friends’ latest tweets and Facebook status updates. But, after having used it for over a week now, I believe this feature drains the battery fast, as well as slowing down processing power. I believe this to be the case because after I removed it most tasks began operating as normal.
In conclusion, the Xperia Play is a smartphone which has a unique feature (its game controllers) that will likely narrow its audience to just gamers. For me it was just too buggy to be my primary phone. I want a phone that is stable and in my testing the Xperia Play was not.