Our Score: 3.5/5  

You may know it as the Playstation Phone, some call it the PSP Phone but Sony Ericsson decided to go with the name Xperia Play possibly because they don’t want to tarnish the “Playstation” name if the phone fails. The device has been talked about for over a year, everyone was contemplating the  idea of the holy matrimony between Playstation and Android.

After many denials of its existence, it was finally officially announced at MWC and straight away gained fame from both the gaming and smart-phone community. Will the Xperia Play become one of the best gaming smart-phones of the year or will it die like the Nokia N-Gage? That’s what you’ll find out in this review.

Design

Having initially just seen pictures and videos of the Xperia Play, I was a bit put off the device due to its size. The weight and dimensions of the XPERIA Play are 175g and 62 x 119 x 16mm. It looked huge thickness wise and I wasn’t to sure if that’s something I would want to hold in my hand or even put in my pocket.

I was fairly shocked when I first held the phone, it didn’t feel heavy or bulky at all although in fact in reality it was. Sony Ericsson has used a technology they call “Human Hand curvature” to design the phone, what that means is they’ve made the back of the device curved so that it fits in your hand better. This design fools you into thinking it’s slimmer than it really is, and that’s a good thing.

The device uses some sort of black glossy plastic for the body similar to what was used for the PSP, you might think it would feel cheap and plastic but surprisingly it doesn’t. The XPERIA Play feels solid in the hand. The device looks great, I can’t fault SE at all on how the phone looks, it’s both elegant and sexy with its silver/chrome sides and piano black finish.

Screen

The Xperia Play isn’t using any fancy screen technology, there’s no AMOLED, no SLCD, nor is it using SE’s Bravia Screen Technology.  It features a standard 4 inch LCD FWVGA (854×480) resolution screen below its capacitive panel. Many websites have criticised the Xperia Play’s screen, saying that it’s not bright enough but I have to disagree. It doesn’t matter what phone I’ve used, they’re all hard to see in direct sun light, although the Xperia Play doesn’t innovate in that aspect, it doesn’t do any worse than other phones I’ve used.

In terms of indoor use the screen was crisp, sharp and clear. The brightness was decent and colours looked vibrant, obviously not on the same level as an AMOLED screen but it was very good for a standard LCD. Only problem I have had with brightness is not being able to turn off the auto brightness in display settings, it seems SE has decided to omit that option. The light sensor is very sensitive, so you’ll notice brightness changing while your using the phone. The auto changing of brightness can initially be annoying but you get used to it and on a positive note it should help you save battery power on the long run.

Hardware

The Xperia Play isn’t running on a dual-core processor as many phones coming out this year are, for what ever reason, SE has decided go with the 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chip, which comes with an Adreno 205 GPU and by no means is that a slouch. While other manufacturers are starting to include a GB of RAM, the Xperia Play has 512MB of RAM, 400MB of which is available for applications to use. The device also comes with a 5 megapixel rear facing camera and a VGA front facing camera which I found to be quiet poor in performance, more on the camera in the camera section of the review below.

You’ll find a proximity and light sensor on the right top side of the device, a power button on the top and the volume rocker cleverly placed between the shoulder buttons for easy reach while playing games. On the opposite side there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack and a Micro USB connector. At the back of the device, just above the LED flash you’ll find a secondary microphone for noise cancellation.

When you take the back cover off, you’ll find that both the SIM and MicroSD card slots are accessible without having to remove the battery. That’s very useful as you should be able to switch SIM cards and MicroSD cards without having to go through with turning the device on again. You’ll notice when removing the back cover that there are 2 speakers, SE has included stereo speakers, which I must say are very good. The stereo speakers are fairly loud and the sound quality is exceptional for a phone, much better than what you get with the HTC Desire HD.

The hardware keys such as the back, home, menu, search and even the game-pad aren’t backlit. It makes it difficult to find the right keys to press in the dark, especially because SE has decided to switch some of the keys around (have a look at the picture below of the navigation keys). Once you know what the keys are, it wont really be much of a problem, but at first it will be slightly annoying.

If your looking for a powerful device with long-term viability, the Xperia Play isn’t the device you want, In terms of the hardware used, it’s already nearly obsolete with other manufacturers releasing phones with much greater hardware. By the end of the year, it’s very likely that this phone will feel outdated.

Game-pad

With all the talk about the internals of the device and it being a little behind the competition, that may not be why you want to purchase the phone. If your planning on getting the Xperia Play it’s most likely because of its slide out game-pad that was designed by Sony Playstation’s DualShock 3 designers. The game-pad is definitely not as  good as a DualShock 3 controller, you probably already know that, but how close does it come to replicating one is the question.

You’ll find your L1 and L2 shoulder buttons respectably placed where you would expect it. There’s a D-pad on the left and menu button below it, on the right you’ll find the Triangle, Circle, X and Square buttons with the Start and Select buttons right below it. The buttons aren’t as raised up as you would find on the DualShock controllers, but it’s more than adequate. You’ll also find that SE hasn’t included dual analogue sticks or nubs, reason being space constraints, instead they’ve gone with dual touch-pads. It took some time to get used to them, and when you do get used to it, I must say that it works very well. The dual touch-pads have a little dot indentation in the middle with an indented circle around it, making it easy for you to know where your thumbs are without having to look at the game-pad. The shoulder buttons are really sensitive, so sensitive in fact that the wait of your index finger sometimes triggers the buttons, so it’ll take some getting used to.

Overall the game-pad is great for a mobile device, by no means is it better than a DualShock 3, but never the less, it does its job and does it very well. I was able to easily pull of Hadoukens and Shoryukens in Street Fighter Alpha 3, so that can only be a good thing. Outside of the gaming environment, you can use the D-pad to navigate through lists and select and cancel things with the X and Circle keys, this comes in very handy when using the browser.

Software

The Xperia Play comes with Google’s latest version of Android, that’s 2.3 or Gingerbread, to be specific it’s running on 2.3.2 with SE’s Custom UI aka Timescape running atop. The Timescape launcher features 5 home screens with a fixed dock at the bottom with 4 customisable icons and Application drawer launcher icon in the centre. Pinching the screen, shows you all the widgets on the 5 home screens in one single page, like a sort of overview mode.

As With any other manufacturer, SE has included their own widgets that you can put on your home screen, these include, Digital Clock, Music Player, Power Controls, Playstation Pocket, Timescape and a few others. Whether you like SE’s widgets is a matter of preference, personally I prefer HTC’s Sense widgets more, as they tend to be more useful.

The rest of the software is pretty much what you would expect from Gingerbread and shouldn’t differentiate much from other phones. Although the Timescape UI is quiet smooth and lag free, you might want to try other launchers, such as Launcher pro, as that would probably make the device much smoother. At the end of the day it’s Android, so it’s pretty much up to you how you want to customise it. If you want to customise your device, check out our guide “Customise your device” for more hints and tips.

Gaming

Putting everything aside, the most important section of the review is the gaming aspects of the phone. SE has included 2 very important applications on the phone named “Xperia Play” and “Playstation Pocket”.

The Xperia Play application serves as a display where you can view all the Xperia Play optimised games in the Android Market in one place, it also lets you see the Xperia Play optimised games you have installed on your device. There’s 28 games (at time of review) listed in the “More Games” tab and probably a few more in the Android Market. Although these games are not bad, they haven’t really excited me much, as I’ve seen these games in the Apple App Store a long time ago. Fifa 10 is pretty old and Fifa 11 has been out for iOS for some time now, I can only hope that SE and Android can push developers into putting more games onto the Android Market much sooner. Initially the Xperia Play comes with 4 Xperia Play optimised games pre-installed, these are, Fifa 10, Bruce Lee, Sims 3 and Star Battalion. All three games played well on the game-pad with the exception of Sims 3, which doesn’t really benefit much from the physical controls. The pre-installed games may vary depending on which country you purchased the device but here in the UK that’s what we got.

The second application SE has included is the Playstation Pocket, which houses some PS One games. It comes pre-installed with Crash Bandicoot and clicking on the search button on the top left brings up a list of more PS One titles that you can purchase. At the time of writing this review there’s 5 games in the list, however if SE really wants this device to succeed they will have to start pumping out more titles.

Now that I’ve written about the Playstation Pocket and Xperia Play applications lets talk about emulation, yes, emulation. Emulators open up a whole new world of gaming on a phone, simply purchasing this device and not trying out emulators would be extremely stupid, the Xperia Play has a great game-pad so it would only be wise to put it to good use. I’ve installed FPse, N64oid and Gameboid on the Xperia play, all of which run very well at good frame rates. All three emulators allow you to map buttons to the game-pad, which is a real joy and you wouldn’t believe how nostalgic I felt playing games like, Marvel vs Capcom, Mario 64, Super Mario World and a few others. Regardless of how many games come out in the Android Market,  installing a few emulators and playing a few of my favourite classics have made the Xperia Play a very desirable phone and mobile gaming system. If you get this device, I strongly suggest forking out a few more Quids on the emulators and trying all those classic games, ones you hopefully have original copies of at home , otherwise I don’t think it would be legal.

Check out the videos below of some gaming action.

Camera

The XPERIA Play has a 5 megapixel rear facing camera and a VGA front facing camera. It doesn’t include the same Exmor R technology used in the Arc nor does it have the f/2.4 aperture value, which improves low-light performance. The Xperia Play pretty much has your standard run-of-the-mill 5 megapixel camera, which doesn’t really take the best of pictures for a phone priced at around £500 and especially for a phone coming out in 2011; it’s pretty sub-standard compared to the likes of the Nexus S, the Desire HD and others. You’re not going to be buying this phone for its camera, that’s for sure.

The device has a single LED flash, so in dark places, images are still a bit too dark or washed out for my liking.

The front facing camera is VGA, the pictures it takes are pixelated and slightly distorted. If you want to use it to take a self portrait image of yourself and use it as an avatar it might suffice otherwise the front facing camera is also sub-standard compared to the competition. I attempted to try out a few video chat applications, such as Fring and Tango, unfortunately at the moment these applications haven’t been updated for the Xperia Play thus the person you are video chatting with will not be able to see you. I’m sure it will work soon enough, it’s just a matter of the developers updating their applications.

I’ve uploaded a few pictures taken using the Xperia Play and the Orange San Francisco for comparison. If you’re thinking, why is he comparing these 2 phone cameras, it’s because I don’t believe the pictures taken with the Xperia Play can compete with the likes of Samsung or HTC, hence the reason why I’m comparing it to the San Francisco and you’ll soon understand why.

Outdoor pictures taken with the Xperia Play

For comparison outdoor pictures taken with the Orange San Francisco

Indoor picture taken with the Xperia Play (Left) and Orange San Francisco (Right)

Outdoor picture taken using the Xperia Play at night

As you can see from the pictures above, in outdoor conditions, pictures taken with the Xperia Play aren’t all that much better than the ones taken with the Orange San Francisco. The picture taken of the Pub looks better on the San Francisco while the picture taken of the vegetables look slightly better with the Xperia Play. In indoor situations, the Xperia Play has the edge with its single LED flash however it is still washed out. Taking pictures at night aren’t completely bad, but the single LED flash isn’t as bright as having 2 LED flashes like the Desire HD.

By no means is it a completly bad camera, the pictures the Xperia Play takes isn’t the worst I’ve seen but paying £500 and it being 2011 and all, I expected much better.

Video taken with the Xperia Play

Another big disappointment is the video recorder, it doesn’t record in HD. I expected 720p as the phone features a second generation Snapdragon processor. Phones that came out last year, like the HTC Desire and the Sony Ericsson X10 which use the first generation of Snapdragon can record in 720p, so why cant the Xperia Play. It’s obvious that the Xperia Play has the hardware inside that’s capable for recording in 720p but SE has decided to omit it for some reason. I can only hope that they include the feature in a future software update. Taking video at night with any phone is pretty bad, especially if it’s in a low lit area, I’ll let you be the judge on how well it takes video at night from the video above.

Browser

If you watched the above video, you’ll notice that the Xperia Play is just a second or so slower than the Desire HD on loading web-pages. The Xperia is still pretty fast compared to phones like the X10 and the original Desire but it’s not to the standards of devices coming out this year. The Desire HD has the same processor and same GPU, but has the edge on RAM, I’m not sure if that’s the reason it loads web-pages faster.

When it comes to pinching to zoom, the Xperia Play tends to lag a little unlike the Desire HD. Double tapping to zoom works fine and text re-flows quick enough, scrolling is also pretty smooth.

Is it the best phone for browsing the Internet? Definitely not but nor is it the worst, you wont be disappointed with browsing web-pages on the Xperia Play and the lag in pinching to zoom will probably be ironed out in a future update.

Benchmarking

Linpack

• Nexus One (Froyo) – 42
• Desire HD – 39½
• Xperia Play – 38.491
• Nexus S – 14
• Galaxy S (Speed Fix’d) – 9.9
• HTC Desire – 7
• Dell Streak – 4

Quadrant

• Galaxy S (with speed fix) – 2,200
• Nexus S (No textures) – 2,100
• Desire HD – 1860
• Xperia Play – 1526
• Nexus One (FroYo) – 1,300
• Galaxy S – 800
• HTC Desire – 520
• Milestone – 350

The results here are both odd and interesting, as I’ve said before the Xperia Play and Desire HD feature the same second generation Snapdragon processor running at 1GHz, and they both feature an Adreno 205 GPU, only difference being the amount of RAM. The Xperia Play has 512MB of RAM (confirmed by SE) while the Desire HD has 768MB of RAM. This could possible explain why the Xperia Play scores slightly less on both benchmarks.

You have to remember numbers are not everything, the Samsung Galaxy S gets 2,200 in Quadrant (with speed fix) and yet in my opinion the Xperia Play is much smoother and quicker with hardly any noticeable lag. A few games however such as Asphalt 6 and Star Battalion demonstrated that lag exists, however, it would be too early to blame it on the device itself. It’s likely the games themselves have yet to be fully optimised for the device. Other games like Fifa 10, Bruce Lee, Cordy and even Dungeon Defenders ran exceptionally well on the Xperia Play.

Battery

This is where you start seeing the advantages of SE not including backlit hardware buttons, and no option to turn off automatic brightness. I have found that the battery life on the Xperia Play has been far better than any other Android phone I’ve used. I couldn’t really go through a whole day with devices like the Galaxy S and Desire HD, especially with the latter. I took the Xperia Play off charge today at 8AM, now at 11:40PM it’s at 40% and that’s with fairly moderate usage. The battery included with the device is a 1500mAh lithium polymer and Sony Ericsson says that users should expect 8.5 hours of talk time and 5.5 hours of game-play.

Hackability

Sony Ericsson recently announced that their latest Xperia phones will come with an unlocked boot-loader, even though previously they where reluctant to do so with their older phones. SE said that only phones that are not SIM-locked will have an unlocked boot-loader so if you want to get your Xperia Play on contract locked to a specific network then unfortunately your phone will still be locked down. Having an unlocked boot-loader makes it that much easier for developers to hack the phone, meaning you should be seeing custom ROMs very soon, and things like overclocking kernels and so on.

Geohot, a leading hacker who is currently being sued by Sony for hacking the PS3, and the first person to jailbreak the iPhone has decided that he will make the Xperia Play his next project. Not sure how much better this makes things, as the Boot-loader will be unlocked from day one, but it certainly makes things more interesting.

Quote from Geohot’s Blog:

“I will be the first person in line on the launch date of the Xperia Play, and itching to get my hands on the Next GEOHOT Project”

The Xperia Play has also been given its own section in the XDA-Developers-Forum, this should help boost ROM development. XDA is very well known for their ingenious developers who get the impossible done.

I’m sure there will be many custom ROMs for the device soon, and we should expect root access soon too, just keep checking hemorrdroids.net for the updates.

Conclusion

As with all our other devices, I’ll break down the bad and the good first for you to see.

Why Buy

• Gingerbread
• Excellent Game-pad
• Fast and smooth performance
• Fantastic battery life
• Excellent stereo speakers
• Excellent emulation potential

Why Not To Buy

• Poor camera for its price
• No 720p video recording
• Hardware buttons and Game-pad not backlit
• Not the latest hardware

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play is by no means the greatest phone ever made, no phone is, but what it is I’ll tell you. Its a great all-round device, it runs on Gingerbread, it’s pretty smooth, takes decent pictures and has a very innovative game-pad that will meet the needs of both the hardcore and casual gamer. When you look at the internals, speed of the device and the camera, it’s definitely not ground breaking. I don’t expect that SE wanted it to be, their aim was to make the Xperia Play a great gaming device, and in my opinion it is.

You wont be buying this device other than for its game-pad and gaming capabilities, so if your not really a gamer then I would suggest you look for a different phone because it might most likely disappoint you. If your a gamer and enjoys killing time here and there, whether it be on the train, your lunch break or even when you should be working, you will definitely like this device. The Xperia Play has its annoyances and flaws but just as a mother would ignore her children’s imperfections and love them for who they are, you’ll also love the Xperia Play regardless, that is if your into gaming.

The success of the Xperia Play will depend on the availability of great games and exclusive titles which SE will have to make sure happens. Those who purchased a Nintendo 3DS or is looking to get the NGP will probably not get this device, but for those that don’t want to carry 2 devices around, then thank the convergence of technology and go ahead and get the Xperia Play.