The appeal is instantaneous to gamers – when the familiar button layout appears from below the phone they can’t help but be tickled at the idea of one device to take care of your cellular and gaming needs. The expectations are high for the first “Playstation Certified” phone and, with the recent surge of gaming enthusiasm, it has the potential to be a big hit. The only question is: does it live up to the hype?

Hardware

The Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY sports much of the same hardware as the Sony Ericsson Xperia arc. Although the extra slide-out buttons make the phone about 50% thicker and heavier than the arc, the arc is remarkably thin and light so the size and weight of the PLAY is actually average for a phone. Other features are pared down, namely the camera is only 5MP and the screen is 4”, losing .2” of screen real estate.

The chipset is exactly the same as the arc: 1GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU and Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon. While the chipset is beginning to show its age, it’s improved over previous iterations. However, like the arc, I suspect the upcoming Android phone processors may blow this away. This isn’t to say that the PLAY can’t handle the load of the games – the graphics don’t stutter or lag in the least. Also, this is the only platform of its kind, so most of the games seem to be tailored to the hardware.

As the picture above shows, the slide-out gaming keyboard features the standard directional buttons as well as triangle, circle, square, X, start and select. Sony Ericsson has also included the Android “menu” button and, as an interesting solution to dual analog sticks, there are analog sensors that work exactly as you’d hope. The addition and implementation of the right and left bumper buttons is quite nice– the controller is comfortable to anyone who’s held a current generation controller or a PSP. What’s really cool about this is the touch screen integration – menus, selecting game and - if you slide in the controls in the middle of a game - the touch screen is easily utilized in a streamlined manner.

The 4 face buttons (back, home, menu and search) work as you’d expect – however, I’m not sure why they decided to use a search button whereas they decided to go without it on the arc; the function doesn’t demand a button of its own. The power button is on the top left of the phone, and has an alert light (to notify you of an email or text message). Because the left bumper is in the place where the volume button usually is, they opted to move the volume buttons to the centre on the right side of the phone.

The aforementioned 5MP camera with its LED flash are the only things on the backside of the phone, besides the Sony Ericsson and Xperia logo – its presentation is nice in this respect. I must say, however, the hardware has more buttons than I’ve ever seen on a touch-screen phone (nearly 20!) and it can seem a little cluttered when compared to most other phones.

A brief note should be made about the memory of the device – it comes with 400 MB of internal memory and an 8 GB microSD card (that can be upgraded to 32 GB) but, this is a gaming-intensive device and I feel there should have been more foresight on how much space owners of the device would use. If you plan on buying games by the boatload, expect to buy a few microSD cards too.

Software

As any dedicated gamer can attest, the value of a gaming platform mainly comes from the game library that supports it. The phone comes with a few games that are pre-loaded and show off the potential of the system. They try to satisfy both hardcore and casual gamers alike – including a Bruce Lee fighting game, FIFA 10, Madden 11 and Star Battalion as the marquee games, but also including the system-selling gem, Tetris.
The graphics are good, but not great. Anyone who has expectations of PSP technologies will be slightly disappointed but, in all honesty, it’s not a huge issue.

There’s a bit of a catch-22 with this phone: once you start playing with the controller, you won’t want to use anything else to game with. The only exception to this rule is Tetris, which needs a portrait orientation due to the shape of the playing field. It doesn’t take long to get adjusted to the portrait orientation, but I can’t help but lament not being able to have that optimal gaming controls to use in that game. This also goes for games like “Angry Birds” – yes, it’s a touch screen game, but I strongly desire to use the d-pad all the time and wish there was a way to do so.

PlayStation has had a history of weak launch titles but the library that this platform supports out of the gate is impressive. They’ve included the PlayStation 1 classic “Crash Bandicoot” to show off how far they’ve come with mobilizing console experiences. At the moment, this phone may not be a must-have for gamers but Sony hopes to roll out a “PlayStation Suite” before the end of the year, which will make the entire library of PlayStation 1 titles purchasable for the Xperia PLAY. PlayStation 1 has such a vast collection of unique games that trying them for the first time or replaying them will make this phone an absolute must-have for any hardcore gamer.

Conclusion

This phone is a great step for mobile gaming. By successfully integrating the Android operating system and simultaneously creating a unique platform for gaming, Sony Ericsson has achieved quite a feat. There are a variety of ways to play and it will be interesting to see if developers will create games unique to this platform.

At first, I was a little disappointed that this wasn’t a fully-functional PSP, as my first impression of the platform led me to believe, but after spending some time with the phone it didn’’ bother me. Sony didn’t want to make a PSP phone because they didn’t want to compete with themselves when the Sony NGP (Next Generation Portable) comes out later this year. There’s not really a threat of that with the Xperia PLAY because this platform has its own unique attributes.

Even though the PLAY doesn’t really compare to a portable gaming-dedicated device like the PSP, I’m hoping this is a success because the idea behind the device is great and it just works – I would like to see more hardware like this in the future.

Don’t forget, we also have a brief review from CellGuru along with a video from Gilbert P of KissMyAppsTV available here.

To watch Gilbert P of KissMyAppsTV’s video see below or click here for mobile friendly viewing.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY is available in Canada exclusively from Rogers here.