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Two months with an Xperia Play

When rumours of a PlayStation phone starting circulating last year, I decided straight away that I had to have one. I was one of those naive souls who bought a Nokia N-Gage way back in 2003, and thought it was the best thing ever until I was ridiculed for looking like a complete numpty when actually using the thing as a phone.

I also became so sick of removing the battery every time I wanted to change whatever game I was playing, that I finally stopped using it altogether. Surely Sony, with all of its expertise and knowledge, would be the company to make the concept of a phone and games machine work, right? Well, almost.

I upgraded my contract with Vodafone early to get an Xperia Play, even though I had heard mixed reports about whether the machine was worth owning. Most of the articles and reviews I read seemed to indicate it was a pretty decent gaming device, but perhaps an average phone. I could live with that - after all, I was never rich enough to get myself an iPhone, and my previous handset was a Samsung Galaxy S, which although very decent, had a battery life roughly equivalent to a Sega Game Gear. It also hadn’t worked so well since I dropped it down the toilet. Don’t ask. This isn’t a tech website, so I won’t go into massive amounts of detail about the mobile phone aspects of the Play. It is a perfectly serviceable Android phone with all the features you could want, but not a lot more besides. It has a five Megapixel camera which is pretty good (although it doesn’t take HD video), the screen is perfectly sound, if a little dull compared to others on the market, and also shows some colour bleed occasionally, due to a slow refresh rate.

It works perfectly well for your typical mobile tasks, like playing music and video (although you may need to get hold of an app for the latter), using Facebook and Twitter, and Internet browsing. Oh, and you can make calls on it, too. Whatever will they think of next?

All in all, it isn’t going to blow your socks off with amazing features or a luscious screen, but it does its job well enough. If it were just a phone, it would be a mid-range product, a cheaper alternative to what the iPhone provides.

Of course, it isn’t just a phone, and that’s what we’re really interested in; how does it perform as a gaming device? Slide out the remarkably PSP Go-like control pad, and the fun side of the phone makes its presence known, and it’s actually a pretty good, if  schizophrenic, experience.

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