Review: Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY 4G, an overriding handheld gaming smartphone

Xperia PLAY 4G is the first PlayStation Certified smartphone from Sony Ericsson. The Android 2.3 Gingerbread smartphone is meant as a complete handheld gaming device with a horizontally slide-out gamepad. There have been wide murmurs over the arrival of the PlayStation phone since mid-2010, but Sony Ericsson showed up the phone at the Mobile World Congress in February 2011. The Sony Ericsson smartphone later hit the stores in April. It is now one of dominant gaming smartphones in the market.

Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY 4G

Key features

PlayStation Certified: Sony PlayStation is one of top gaming platforms in the world. With a collection of diverse gaming consoles and titles, Sony PlayStation is largely popular among gaming enthusiasts. Sony has planned the PlayStation smartphone as a complete handheld gaming console plus smartphone solution for PlayStation fans.

Slide-out gamepad: You can use Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY simply as a smartphone with its large 4-inch touchscreen display. In this case, Xperia Play is like all other Android smartphones. But if you want to go for some gaming in leisure time, you can just slide out the gamepad horizontally from the device. The gamepad is just like Sony’s DualShock controllers and it contains a set of PlayStation buttons, rectangular touchpad in the middle part, and other PlayStation controllers.

Large display: So as to make gaming a great experience, Sony Ericsson has slotted in a 4-inch display on its Xperia PLAY smartphone. The touchscreen display has a resolution of 854 × 480 pixels for better clarity.

Better processor and GPU: Being a complete gaming smartphone, the Sony PlayStation smartphone sports superior tech specs. The smartphone is equipped with a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, 512 MB RAM, 512 MB internal storage and a Qualcomm Adreno 205 GPU.

What is innovative

Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY is not just a smartphone. What is innovative with this Gingerbread device is that it is a complete handheld PlayStation gaming device. You can play most of PlayStation titles on this incredibly designed smartphone. If you are a serious gamer, you can non-hesitantly go for the Sony PlayStation phone, because you can just carry a single device for gaming, phone calling, web surfing, video watching and music listening.

Price and availability

From the second week of September 2011, AT&T sells Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY for just $49.99 with a two-year agreement. Verizon Wireless also sells the industry’s only PlayStation certified smartphone.

Accessories

Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY comes with a headset and user manual.

The up side

The Sony PlayStation phone is a 4G smartphone. Running on AT&T’s 4G network, the device provides great internet speed. You can instantly download games, play online games and watch movies using the magnificent smartphone from Sony Ericsson.

The device features a microSD card slot that can support a memory card of up to 32GB capacity. Accelerometer, microUSB 2.0, touchpad and advanced gamepad with 13 plus PlayStation buttons make it a superb gaming device, which also has a 5-megapxel camera in the rear panel.

The down side

Even being a high-end gaming smartphone, Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY is a lackluster when its multimedia aspects are concerned. The device is having only a 5-megapixel camera in the rear panel. And more unfortunately, it does not have a front camera for video chatting. Moreover, it has an inferior internal memory capacity.

Our experience

As per reports, gamers are hugely satisfied with the Sony PlayStation phone from Sony Ericsson. With its multiple purposes as a smartphone and handheld gaming device, many more customers may love the gorgeous gadget.

The bottom line

The Sony PlayStation phone might be one of much-rumored smartphones in the technology world, of course, after Apple’s annual iPhone upgrades. There have been gossips about a handheld gaming device cum smartphone from Sony Ericsson from the middle of 2010. However, Sony Ericsson went on to announce the device early 2011; and the device came to reality in a few weeks. Months after its launch, the Sony PlayStation phone is making buzz in the market, and certainly attracting large numbers of customers.