I picked up a loaner Sony Ericsson Xperia Play for two reasons: a desire to check out the latest Android OS (Gingerbread), and to see whether adding specialized gaming hardware to an Android smartphone truly could a Playstation Phone make.
So I shoved my iPhone 3GS into a drawer for two weeks and immersed myself in native Google Sync, unlimited customization, and just a little bit of Playstation.
Hardware
The front of the Play is framed by a set of four buttons – back, home, menu, search (in that order) – along the bottom of the 4” backlit LCD screen. This high resolution screen (480×854) was quite refreshing coming from the 3GS (which sports only 320×480 pixels), but it didn’t feel nearly as accurate, and I often had to tap a good half inch above the on-screen targets to get the Play to register things properly.
The rest of the device seemed relatively standard compared to other Android devices I’ve seen:
- The front of the device also houses a secondary front-facing camera for video calls, but I only ever used it for quick vanity shots, and I almost forgot to mention it in this review.
- The top of the phone is home to a power button with a built-in LED. I wasn’t all too keen on the idea of this LED at first, but I really came to like the idea and rather missed it upon returning to my 3GS.
- The right side of the Play houses the L and R shoulder buttons (for gaming) and an all-too-delicate volume rocker that simply never felt quite right.
- The left side of the device has two holes: one for earphones and another for a micro-USB cable. I had no qualms about the charging port being on the left side of the phone, but it was strange to plug earphones in on the left, since this can make it awkward to pocket the phone.
- Along the back of the Play is the main 5 MP auto-focus camera, flash, and a convex battery door that makes the whole package easier to palm. The camera itself was surprisingly good: it loaded and saved quickly, offered lots of picture-taking options. Its only downside has nothing at all to do with hardware, but may as well be mentioned here: the beep for the camera is obnoxiously loud and doesn’t seem to care what your system volume is set to.
- Battery life on the Play was actually quite good. It could make it through a day of heavy usage and gaming, and about a day and a half if I didn’t do any gaming at all. I kept the brightness at half, GPS off, but wi-fi and 3G stayed on at all times.
- Telephony on the Play was decent for the most part, but the phone’s volume also tended to dip sporadically during calls that lasted more than five minutes (I tested this out in conversation with a variety of different phones).
Of course, to end a hardware tour of the Xperia Play right there would be remiss. There’s just a little more to this gaming phone under its slider design, and shifting the front face of the Play to the right will reveal a full set of gaming controls.
All of the buttons and pads you’d expect on a Playstation device are present, except that the single “nub” on the Playstation Portable is replaced by two analog touchpads. The hardware buttons here are absolutely excellent. The directional pad is easy to manipulate, the face buttons (square, circle, x, triangle) feature just the right amount of travel, and the L and R buttons are comfortable to hold and press. There’s also a menu button below the d-pad that mirrors the functionality of the menu button under the screen, but I almost never used it.
There is only one weak point in this specialized Playstation control scheme: the analog pads. These touch-sensitive suckers ended up being total analog wannabes instead of genuinely useful controls. I usually rely on analog sticks for fine-grain control in games, but these circular touchpads were only useful for the simplest of gestures (e.g. swiping up to turn your ship around in Gameloft’s Star Battalion) – and these gestures were usually mapped to other buttons, anyway. In short, I found no reason to even touch these touchpads after the first two days of play.
Xperia + Playstation
Speaking of Play, it’s time to address the big question: what kind of gaming experience does the Xperia Play offer gamers? The Rogers ads scattered around Toronto declare that the Play is a smartphone that is serious about gaming. That sounded very promising to me, since I’ve been a long-time console and PC gamer.
As it turns out, the answer is a little complicated. Sony has only just begun to roll out its Playstation Suite with Android, and a quick sweep of popular gaming blogs showed me that nobody is quite sure in which direction Sony will take this partnership. There are some very promising titles (Minecraft!) coming to the Xperia Play “soon”, but they’re not here yet, and I only had the loaner device for two weeks. So while the future of the Play could hold awesome titles like Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, or Ace Combat, the best I could find in the pre-installed lineup of Playstation games was the first Crash Bandicoot – you know, the 3D platformer that just had its 14th anniversary.
The emulation of Crash ran without crashing, but I’ll confess that I didn’t spend more than a few minutes with the game, since it held no real interest for me in 1996, and holds even less interest for me in 2011. There were a few more Playstation titles, such as MediEvil and Syphon Filter, to purchase for three or four dollars (a fair price), but none of them hit home for me. The original Playstation had a fantastic catalogue of games, and I was a little disappointed to find out that none of the titles I loved (Twisted Metal 2, NBA JAM T.E.) made it into the Play’s starting lineup.
I also found myself asking what Sony Ericsson envisioned when they certified the Play as a Playstation phone. I can understand that it might have to run ports of PS One titles instead of modern PSP games due to hardware limitations, but why does sliding the Play open bring you to a games menu that has nothing at all to do with the Playstation brand?
The actual suite of PS titles is only shown in a widget and an icon hidden away in the apps menu, so what you actually see when you slide the Xperia Play open is a list of specialized Android and mobile (java) games.
The Play I used came pre-installed with a few titles, the most interesting of which was Gameloft’s Star Battalion, a Star Wars, Star Fox, and Star anything space shooter clone. I sunk a few hours into Star Battalion just to see how the Play’s controls held up, and had no complaints. The same went for Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior, although the good hardware controls did nothing for the terrible gameplay.
Titles that needed downloading from the Android Market, such as Gameloft’s Asphalt 6, showed another major oversight in the Playstation branding of the phone. On both my PSP and my iPhone 3GS, all I have to do is initiate a download and wait for the device to complete it – even if the download is in the hundreds of megabytes. Many of the more “hardcore” titles on the Play are large games that require a two-step process: download a small installer file and then launch said installer to download the bulk of the game. I don’t take issue with the number of steps in the installation, but rather that I had to manually turn the Play’s auto-sleep off before downloading any new titles, or the phone would simply fall asleep and stall the download.
The main point I want to make here is that the Play doesn’t feel very much like a Playstation-certified machine, rather than an outsourced chunk of hardware with a Playstation sticker. The only thing that really screams Playstation on the Play are the set of hardware controls, and while they do make the whole experience of handheld gaming a lot better, the current crop of games on the system just seem like ways to buy time while Minecraft and other temporarily exclusive titles hoof it to the Xperia Play.
Xperia + Timescape
The Xperia Play runs on Android 2.3 and felt lightning fast in everyday usage. Loading apps, activating the camera, and flicking between home screens was completely fluid, and RAM was always in plentiful supply. The Play is a far cry from the last Android device I tried out, the woefully underpowered Motorola DEXT.
However, as with Motorola and the DEXT, I couldn’t help but feel that Sony Ericsson mucked things up with their Timescape skin in a number of different areas:
- While most of the pre-installed widgets for digital clocks and calendars worked quite well, Sony Ericsson’s own Timescape widget was next to useless. It’s basically a universal inbox for your messages and social networks, but rendered in pointless 3D, which means that you see a lot less information than in a regular “flat” list. What’s more, Timescape is really only good for presenting a few lines of text, and it ended up re-routing me to other apps just to read a whole tweet or status update.
- Another strange choice in the Sony Ericsson scheme of things is the lack of a voice input button on the default keyboard. I believe that a gesture (swipe right) to activate voice input may have been included, but a button would have been a lot easier to find and use. I found the voice input button on all other third party keyboards I installed, so I’m really not sure why SE would go out of their way to obscure one of Android’s best features.
- Finally, there’s the skinned contacts app, which only shows you one line of the Notes field. I rely on the Notes field for checking friends’ room numbers and it just seems absurd to limit users to viewing one line and providing no ability to scroll to see more. The HTC Hero and LG Optimus don’t behave this way, so I see this as an example of the little things that can fall through the cracks when phone manufacturers try to re-invent the wheel with each new Android device.
Conclusion
Sony Ericsson’s skinning of Android isn’t all bad, but I couldn’t help thinking of it as getting in the way of the decent experience that core Android 2.3 offers. The dedicated gaming controls on the Play are actually pretty awesome overall, but the lack of actual Playstation titles that I wanted to play was quite disappointing. The Play should become a more entertaining device in the coming months, but unlike the $5-10 apps that I normally review, I don’t feel I can recommend this smartphone on the assumption that “it should get better”.
Smartphones – especially ones on the Android platform – become outdated fairly quickly, so potential buyers should focus on what the device can do right now. The only truly impressive aspects here are the unique gaming controls and Android 2.3 – but the benefit of those controls is limited without better games to play, and Android 2.3 can already be found on a number of other devices.
So even if I was looking around for an Android device right now, I’d probably look to the Xperia Arc, Galaxy S2, or the Nexus S for a more quality experience.
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