As promised, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play has been announced for AT&T before the end of the year. The device will be launching on September 18 for $49.99 on a two-year contract, and will be available in an exclusive blue tinge. As a PlayStation phone, it comes loaded with a couple of solid titles, like Madden NFL 1, The Sims 3, and Crash Bandicoot, along with having a bunch of tailor-made games available in the Android Market.
The Xperia Play is unique for its slide-out game controller, right down to the shoulder buttons and dual capacitive joysticks. Specs-wise, the Xperia Play does reasonably well. It’s running Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread, has a 4-inch 480 x 854 display, a 5 megapixel camera on the back plus front-facing VGA shooter, all running on a 1 GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM. Be sure to check out our full review if you’re thinking of picking one up.
Sony Ericsson has been on a roll with device releases over the last couple of weeks leading up to the back-to-school season; just take a look at the Ray, Arc S, Tablet S, and the Neo V. So far, Sony Ericsson has made the most concerted effort towards making a gamer-centric phone since the N-gage, but considering the big-name publishers they’re wrangling (not to mention the innovative smaller guys like Minecraft), I imagine it will fare better in the long run. AT&T is calling their Xperia Play 4G, if you want to consider HSPA+ that, but I think we’d all prefer to see an LTE version. As is, the only LTE device they’ve gone public with is the Droid Bionic. Even though the addition of LTE connectivity may offer some new possibilities for a gaming smartphone, the biggest issue with making a solid multiplayer experience is keeping latency low, which means AT&T will need to keep coverage wide and performance consistent if they want to free multiplayer portable games from Wi-Fi zones.
What do you guys think of the Xperia Play? Is it worth the added bulk of a dedicated slide-out keyboard, or would you sooner go with a dedicated gaming device, like the Nintendo DS?
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