Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Retton here from TechnoBuffalo here with a full review of the first PlayStation Certified phone this is advice that had been rumored for almost years let's go ahead take a look and see if it's worthy of the PlayStation name so to say Sony's had maybe a rough few weeks with their PlayStation name and the PSN network getting a little bit a hat would probably be an understatement that doesn't take away from what the Xperia Play promises to bring and that is playstation gaming mobile so let me remind you of the specs of this guy and then we'll go ahead and run through all the phone goodness that it has so it's got a four inch diagonal display and that is TFT with the resolution of 480 by 854 it's being powered by a scorpion arm 1 gigahertz processor and we'll talk about how the performance is in just a minute 512 megabytes of RAM and ROM it's got an Adreno GPU graphics accelerator it's got a 5 megapixel camera on the back with autofocus flash and some cool kind of smile detection business it can shoot video in 720p so it's 1280 by 720 it's running Android 2.3 Gingerbread which is kind of awesome and it's got a pretty beefy battery here which is going to get you through most of the day all right so that's great there the specs let's first talk about call quality this is a phone and it's got to make phone calls this is the unlocked unit which is available to be purchased from the folks at clove Co UK it'll work on 18 T's 3G network if you guys are wondering Verizon has announced they will be carrying it in the US it'll be in storage on the 26th available for pre-orders on the 19th but if you are on AT&T or t-mobile and you're looking to get your hands on this guy I check out the folks club code at UK link will be down below gold-coated was just about average in my 20 called test I had three dropped calls people on the other end definitely knew I was on a cell phone there was some popping in the call quality was a little bit tinny I did have Bluetooth connectivity issues definitely want to check this compatibility wise with your car's Bluetooth or your headset if that's what you use for phone calls something definitely to keep in mind speakerphone was quite loud alright so let's talk about the screen we'll jump pass all that business how does this thing look let me show you what some pictures look like here this is always a good way to show we'll go ahead and jump into wallpapers Sony Ericsson wallpapers let's go and take a look at a red one go ahead and set it and you can see the pictures look about average we've got it set to auto brightness here it doesn't look bad it doesn't look great I expected a little brighter images to pop a little bit more from Sony company that's really known for for high quality displays but the real test for me is how text looks so I'll go ahead and jump into the browser there we go you can see on a white background there's a little bit of a greyish blue tint something that we saw with the first-generation AMOLED screens out of Samsung and put out nothing giant but it's definitely there text is crisp you're not gonna have any trouble reading text on its four inch screen there's a couple other interesting things here to note as well I know you guys are a lot of performance junkies out there I did run this through a quadrant test in appleton a pretty respectable 1392 and this is what the stock rom there wasn't anything flashed on here this is just to have so many Erik's and chips it and speaking of how Sony Ericsson ships it their Android UI is to call Timescape it sort of puts everything together and a big list of stuff I didn't like it I turned it off I generally didn't use it but they do give you some cool functionality nurse' meets sony ericsson widgets here you can do your little pinch to zoom thing you can see all your widgets here splayed out I wish you could have moved them around from the screen you can't you can just see them and jump right to them there are some to like go and show you very quickly what some of the sony ericsson custom widgets are you can see some of the standard Android ones here than some of the other ones that Sony goes ahead and adds for you one of the kind of cool touches that it does give you are some animations which I'm sure just suck battery if I wanted to move an icon around you can watch what it doesn't I do it does a little bounce it's very subtle but it really lets you know they're using a high quality device one of the gripes that I had about the phone is a placement of the buttons here on the bottom so first I like that there are physical buttons I do wish it there was some sort of backlight so if I was in a dark setting the screen wasn't providing enough brightness I could see what the buttons are because they are in a very strange order that I haven't really seen on any other Android phones got the back button home button menu button in search button whereas if you look on other Android phones here is say the Droid Charge for example with the more standard button layout you've got a little different setup here with the back button located down the second to the right the menu button on the left it's just a little bit odd I'm not saying it's bad just wasn't what I was used to so if you're coming from another Android device definitely going to have a little bit of a finger memory learning curve that's not the big deal with the Xperia Play what everybody wanted to see and what I wanted to see was what lives when you slide this up this is where the Xperia Play gets its name it's able to play a pretty decent amount of actually ps1 games and that's where a lot of these Xperia Play games come from so let me give you a quick example of what one of these games look like so I'll go ahead and use the buttons that I've got right here I've got an Android menu button and when you're gaming also I have two shoulder buttons that live right there I'm going to go ahead and go back home and I've got crash bandicoot was a game that I was playing was available to be downloaded and I'll show you guys in just a minute when you download these games they actually come from the Android Marketplace I thought there was going to be some sort of custom sony skin store and just a sony store in the Android Marketplace so you can see what the graphics look like they are pretty impressive but there's nothing better than I haven't seen on any other Android device really what the killer thing is here is a game catalog and the ability to play other us ps1 games which are extremely popular so because of the size of the phone this four-way navigation is really really tight and close together I had a hard time sort of moving my fingers around I've got relatively large thumbs making sure I didn't hit two buttons it took some getting used to something to bear in my off time in a corner and hitting to the four shape buttons a typical Stoney buttons here the triangle the X a square in a circle I like saying that to show I prove that I know my shapes did work very well I didn't have any of the same issues with the arrows for whatever reason and you got these two I would feel dirty when I do this there was a touch buttons here which are used for some navigation sometimes you need to control them kind of neat to see you've got your start and select button games work well the controls were fun it didn't kill battery as much as I would like I was able to get a full day a while playing some serious games on here but in all honesty the games that sony gives you can be a bit expensive in fact I'll show you what some of those are in a minute but for me one of the most appealing things about having a phone like this is something like this so assuming that you own the original cartridges you can download a ton of emulators for different games so I've got a Super Nintendo emulator here and I always go ahead and playing my Super Mario Brothers which was kind of awesome and you can map these controllers for anything you want this is what made the Xperia Play really cool and probably wasn't what Sony was aiming at but it really let me feel I could take a Super Nintendo with me anywhere on there emulators available for a ton of consoles and of course only games that you own genesis nintendo on really any other console this can very easily handle so we'll go ahead and exit out of this let me go ahead and show you some of the other options here for purchasing games so you can see what that might look like alright so as you guys might have seen when you open this up you are going to be taken to the PlayStation sort of store and you can see there are a ton of different games let's go ahead and take a look at hockey nations 2011 this is going to open up right from Android Marketplace you can see the price of the games and some of the games ranged from 11 to 12 bucks down to as low as $0.99 this particular one here is 399 available in the sports game category go ahead and hit download and you can get your game on go ahead and jump back home so what's the final conclusion on the Xperia Play to be honest the benefits that Sony Ericsson is gaming out here with the PlayStation Store and the PlayStation Certified experience is average the game qualities you saw on crash bandicoot was just okay I wasn't overly impressed with with game plan that particular game or the controls in general what really sells the Xperia Play for me is the built-in gamepad for emulators really opens up a ton of possibilities for this device so if you do find yourself on a subway on a train playing a lot of games and touch only controls aren't doing it for you or mapping buttons to your QWERTY keyboard aren't doing it for you this is going to be a really solid device to look at you can take really full advantage of an awesome gaming experience just based on having this gamepad now certainly you could probably do this with a Bluetooth keyboard or a micro USB attachment if your phone supports it what you probably make this a bit obsolete generally on the phone this thick I would want to have a keyboard however I can really live with it if you are a gamer and you want to take your games with you I can definitely recommend the Xperia Play performance was solid battery life was good screamer's average call quality wasn't overly impressed with but it did work a 5 to give this sort of a wone at a 5 ranking here I'd probably give it a very solid three-and-a-half I would have liked to have seen a little bit of brighter screen with some crisper images and some crisper text and I would like to have seen a more robust PlayStation Store on here with better quality and selection of games the Timescape interface was ok it wasn't overly clunky you can obviously turn it off or customize it because it is Android but it was just alright anyway guys love to hear you have to say in your thoughts on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play I am John renter from TechnoBuffalo and I'll see you in 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