On top of the PSP 2, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, formerly codenamed the Zeus Z1 and the PSP Phone, has also broken cover again today, after a few months of sporadic leaks. We’ve put together what we now know about the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play into one digestible chunk. Click through for everything you need to know about the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play.
Hardware
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play is hitting the shelves with no PlayStation branding, and will be flying under the Sony Ericsson flag. It has a single core processor that pushes somewhere in the region of 1GHz. There’s 512MB of RAM, and a 4-inch multitouch 854 x 480 LCD (the same as the X10). On the front of the phone, just below the screen, there’s also four hardware buttons: back, menu, home and search. The 1500mAh battery is good and strong, and should give you a day of heavy usage, and there’s also a microSD slot, which you don’t need to remove the battery to get at.
Controls
To get to the Xperia Play controls, push the screen upwards and at about the half way point a sprng mechanism does the rest, and the PlayStation controls will slide out. There is only one pair of shoulder buttons, and no news on whether the touchpads can substitute the DualShock mechanical sticks.
Camera
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play has a 5MP camera, and while it performed well, there’s no tap to focus feature in the stock camera app. Engadget also found a bug whereby the viewfinder displayed a cropped image. In terms of video recording, if you’re after HD, look somewhere else, as the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play does not have 720p capabilities, and is stuck at 800 x 480.
Software
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play will come running Android Gingerbread and we’re expecting to see Android Marketplace on here too. In terms of changes to the Sony Ericsson side of things, Mediascape has been split up into several widgets: a music player, gallery and media shortcuts to open up media player apps. There’s an added home screen feature with the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play too: to bring up all the widgets onto one screen pinch the screen. Then tap on a widget and you’ll be taken to its corresponding home screen. Engadget found that the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play’s video playback could handle 720p H.264 video clips, and there’s also a preloaded app called the PlayStation Pocket.
Every time we get an eyeful of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play it looks better and better, and we’re more and more tempted. Do you want one? Shout out in the comments!
[via Engadget]
