MWC 2011 Live: Sony Ericsson Xperia Play Hands-On Preview

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The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play has been launched officially at MWC 2011, or better said, a day before the show will be kicked off officially, and, as soon as the media event was finished, we were invited to go play, with the Xperia Play (pun totally intended), and the other new Sony Ericsson handsets.

The Xperia Play is the first PlayStation Phone in the world and will probably be followed by a few successors in the years to come. The device is pretty bulky (see comparison with the iPhone below) for my taste, considering it has to come with a full slide-out controller section, but when it comes to playing games, the external slide-out controls certainly pay off. And that slide-out controller seems pretty solid which is exactly what I’d want in a mobile gaming device with a sliding mechanism.

Unfortunately the devices on display were not really preloaded with too many games, which kinda left us wanting for more. I mean sure, I played Asphalt, but that’s not really new, and FIFA isn’t either. The only thing left was Star Battalion and Bruce Lee: Dragon Warrior, which I abandoned as soon as I, the virtual Bruce Lee, was getting shred to pieces by my opponent.

When it comes to actual gaming you’ll find the regular PlayStation buttons and the reinvented joysticks pretty useful, especially with certain games that will require some complex controls, although the joysticks themselves will take some getting used to. There are also two shoulder buttons, which should also come in handy, and we expect them to be configurable in various Play titles. But can Play-gameplay turn out to be addictive like, say, Angry Birds? We’re certainly interested to see how the Play will satisfy our gaming needs. In fact, would the battery of the device be enough to let us play all the games we want but also use it as a smartphone? After all Sony Ericsson reminded us a bunch of times this was a smartphone too.

We weren’t really able to test the phone features of the Play on display, although we did fire up the good old browser, but overall, the device was pretty responsive and we could get in and out of games pretty fast only to go about our regular business. At the same at least one Xperia Play crashed in the middle of some gaming action and it didn’t look like it was going to boot without special assistance. Nonetheless there’s still time to iron out any potential problems by launch date, which is supposed to be sometime in March.

The good news is the Play will run Gingerbread out of the box (hopefully upgradeable to future Android versions) and we expect some 50 games to be available at launch. These two elements could be some very important reasons for buying or ignoring the Play.

We’ll be back with more Play news so keep following our feed and our Twitter account in the mean time.

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