Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

It's fair to say that we've been curious to see what would happen if you crossed a mobile phone with a PlayStation for a long time.  The Xperia Play helps answer that question by bringing together a high-end smartphone and a top-quality handheld games console in a single product.  The idea is certainly attractive, so let's see what it's like in reality.

Looks boring but feels heavy

The design of the Xperia Play doesn't really help it stand out from the crowd.  Like earlier handsets from the Xperia range, it has a good quality finish but a rather traditional design and looks like just another smartphone.  What is different though is the weight, which is rather bulky.


The screen is one of the most important elements if you're hoping to play lots of games on your phone—but it leaves quite a lot to be desired.  Things start out well with a rather unusual resolution of 854 x 480 pixels which works well across the four inches, but it starts to go wrong after that.  With a very blue colour temperature, trouble reproducing colours accurately, problems with the gamma and barely acceptable contrast, it's nothing to write home about.  And the glossy finish on the screen hardly makes using it outside in bright sunlight very easy.

The user interface is classic Sony Ericsson stuff: the good news is that you have four solid physical buttons at the bottom; the bad news is that they're tiny.  They're easy to use though and there's none of the frustration of touch-sensitive buttons that it's easy to activate by accident.

Interface and multimedia: nothing new

The smartphone half of the Play doesn't really revolutionise things.  Sony's intuitive, well-designed Timescape software is back.  It's much better than the attempts from rivals Motorola and Samsung, but not as impressive as HTC Sense.

The Play does incredibly well at taking photos and videos.  We say 'incredible' because even the Arc isn't as good.  The iPhone 4 is still better, but adds a slight red tinge to photos, while the Arc does a better job of accurately representing flesh tones.  We have to congratulate Sony Ericsson for its effort on the audio front, even if it's just for the in-ear headphones that come with the Xperia Play that are much better than what we're used to from a phone.




But this phone is called the 'Play' for a reason: it's time for some fun.  Let's see what the gaming half of this smartphone is like.

The first step is to slide out the controls from under the screen, and anybody who's used a PSP or a PS3 will be right at home.  There's a directional pad on the left and the cross, circle, square and triangle buttons on the right.  Rather than two analogue joysticks in the centre, there are two small touch-sensitive pads which are less easy to use.

That just leaves the rather unusually positioned Start and Select buttons (as well a third button that brings up a contextual menu to switch between PlayStation games and the phone itself) and the triggers.  There's bad news about the last two: L1 and R1 are hidden behind the screen, but L2 and R2 are nowhere to be seen.  After checking the menu, we discovered that you need to simulate them by pressing two keys at once.  That doesn't really bode well for rapid-fire gaming ...


Having real buttons makes Android games much easier to play with a faster, more accurate experience than usual.  We're used to occasionally losing control, especially around the edge of the touchscreen display, but we're glad to report that there are no such problems here.

Things aren't quite the same with PSN or PSO games, which usually require the triggers or the analogue joysticks. Unsurprisingly, the two round touch-sensitive pads aren't really an effective replacement for the original, and holding down up and pressing L1 to simulate L2 isn't that much use either.  It's the triggers that disappointed us the most: because of the phone's shape, they're very hard to reach when you slide out the screen and are too narrow to get a good grip of. 


Three types of tiles are available: Android games that work with the phone's physical controls, PSOne games and games from the PlayStation Network.  You can't get hold of existing PSP titles or ones you've already downloaded from the PSN.  You'll have to buy them again—which is almost as frustrating as the battery life.  Spend much time gaming and you'll soon drain the battery.  Despite Sony Ericsson's promise of five hours of gaming time, we suggest you make sure you keep the charger with you because we found that the five hours went by very quickly indeed!


We didn't notice any annoying delays, but we're still not quite sure what we make of the Play.  It's a good smartphone, but not great, and while it's better for gaming that most mobiles, it's not as good as dedicated handheld console.  Given how hard it is to access content, it's hard to see it making much of an impact.  It's clearly fun to be able to play games that are more advanced than the rest of what you find in the Android Market and to carry a single device.  But we don't really see how the Play is going convince fans to abandon their PSPs or NGPs.  And if they're not the target market, who is?