Xperia Play is coming

Oh yeah.... I've been waiting... for this announcement that Sony Ericsson teased, like 7 days ago? And it's here, though most of the details have been leaked already, we had to wait for official word on the important ones-- the specs and the release dates. Coming in March(?) for the U.S. with Verizon. No info yet on release date or carrier for Canada. UPDATE: MobileSyrup is reporting that Rogers will offer Xperia Play "Spring 2011".

Engadget has a brief hands-on here.

Joystiq has the full specs posted here. Basically it's got a 1GHz Scorpion ARMv7 processor, running Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and the phone has 400 MB of onboard storage.... which doesn't seem like very much. I think the operating system takes up a big chunk of that, I know that the phone will use bunches of it during the day, *AND* installing apps/Android games fill that space up.... so it doesn't go very far. I know that some people will say, "Android 2.2.+up lets you load apps to the SD card....".... yeah, *BUT* a lot of apps don't support that feature. Newer ones are more likely to do so, but most of them still don't seem to. So while it's great that theoretically Android 2.2 & up lets us do that... in REALITY it isn't all that useful in day-to-day Android phone use. Yet. Oh yeah, it also comes with an 8GB microSD card in the box.

Xperia Play weighs 175g, which seems a bit heavy... isn't the full-size PSP around 200g? Another thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of people who post on the articles about Sony Ericsson phones that they had really bad experiences with them. I've seen more than a few "I am so glad I switched to an HTC..." type of posts... I'm not sure about the newest HTC phones, but I'm currently using an HTC Legend and I reeeeeeeally love it, personally... but just looking over the Xperia UI and these disgruntled owners really gives me pause about Sony Ericsson phones. Not sure if it'd be worth the expense to get one...

But the Xperia Play does look fun simply because of the buttons. I don't know what would stop people from using it for GBA emulators and PS1 emulators rather than buying the games through Playstation Suite. And I seriously doubt there will be much PSP crossover games coming to the platform.





later
don