One of the worst-kept secrets in smartphones and/or gaming—the Xperia Play, a.k.a. the PlayStation phone—is finally official, and it's reportedly coming to a U.S. carrier near you in a matter of weeks.
Armed with a four-inch display, a five-megapixel camera, and a set of slide-out gaming controls that had been leaked from one end of the Web to the other over the past several months, Sony Ericsson's Android-powered Xperia Play will get a worldwide release next month, Sony execs said Sunday at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. Gearlog says the new handset will arrive Stateside on Verizon, potentially as an exclusive.
Engadget had already spilled most of the beans about the Xperia Play in an early hands-on report a few weeks back, and Sony had been heavily hyping the phone through a series of teasers and an incredibly creepy Super Bowl TV ad.
But we didn't have the official specs until Sunday, much less a lineup of initial games.
The 6.2-ounce, 16mm-thick handset will arrive with a four-inch, 480-by-854-pixel display, says Sony, along with stereo speakers, a five-megapixel camera (no sign of a front-facing lens, unfortunately), on-demand media via Sony Ericsson's PlayNow service, and a microSD slot for memory expansion. (An 8GB memory card will come bundled in the box.)
The Xperia Play will run on Android 2.3 "Gingerbread," Sony confirmed, and will arrive with a 1GHz Scorpion ARMv7 processor with an embedded Adreno CPU, good for 3G gaming at 60 frames per second.
We've already seen the slide-out gaming controls from every possible angle, but they're worth summarizing again: we're talking the standard D-pad on the left and a quartet of PlayStation buttons (triangle, square, circle, and "X") on the right, with a pair of analog touchpads sitting in the middle. A pair of shoulder buttons will double as triggers, similar to the controls on the DualShock controller.
One of the key questions about the Xperia Play is how much gaming you'll get out of a single charge; the answer, Sony claims, is about five-and-a-half hours worth. Whether that estimate holds up under real-world testing remains to be seen, of course.
The Xperia Play will mark the first "PlayStation-certified" handset, and as such will get access to games via the coming "PlayStation Suite": a new Android-based gaming platform that Sony announced last month alongside the upcoming NGP portable gaming console.
Among the first titles to arrive in the PlayStation Suite will be The Sims 3, FIFA 10, a "Guitar Hero" game (the franchise lives, at least in the mobile world), Assassin's Creed, and Splinter Cell, according to Sony.
How much will the Xperia Play cost? No word on that yet, unfortunately.
— Ben Patterson is a technology blogger for Yahoo! News.
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