Sunday at World Mobile Congress, Sony Ericsson unveiled one of the most waited gadgets for gamers, the PlayStation phone – Xperia Play. Steve Walker (head at Sony Ericsson marketing department) said that this smartphone is to be release in March for US folks and Verizon will be the first operator to put its hand on it.
Xperia Play is an Android-based smartphone and according to Walker this will be “the dream of high quality mobile gaming”. Advertised on Super Bowl, the Xperia comes with a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor and a Adreno graphic processor capable of playing 60 frames per second. A 4 inch screen and a 5 MP camera are added to this gadget, but when it comes to gaming the Xperia Play seems out of this world: a slide-out game pad, 2 shoulder buttons, 2 touch pads, a D pad and buttons with a cross, square, circle and triangle.
This is not the single announcement made by Sony Ericsson but it is probably the most important one made at this year’s WMC in Barcelona, Spain. Sony Ericsson also announced it shall launch three new phones – Arc, Neo and Pro – all running on Android. Xperia Arc will come with a 4.2 inch screen, Xperia Neo comes with a HDMI port, 8MP camera and the ability to create folders while the Xperia Pro comes as a smartphone for business world with its email interface and QWERTY slide-out keyboard.
Returning to our main subject, it seems that Xperia Play already has more than 50 popular games available to be tested on this gadget, from Assassin’s Creed to Guitar Hero and even the popular Dead Space. Among its publishing partners we can see popular names like EA, Fishlabs and Gameloft, and it is expected that the most popular football game – FIFA – to be brought on this device as well as the first multiplayer version for mobile devices.
Good news do not end here – an online game store named PlayStation Network is expected to be launched this year, a “marketplace” for games running on Android operating system phones, games certified by Sony. We shall wait and see how popular Xperia Play will be on its launch, but just by seeing its fantastic features we will not be amazed if it will become a hit among gamers all over the world.