Our main dude in England has his hands on the Xperia PLAY, also known as the “Playstation Phone,” and he’s reviewing it fully for our sister site SlashGear. This device goes by model name R800x, runs a full Android 2.3 Gingerbread experience, and has a 4″ capacitive multi-touch, 854 x 480 pixel FWVGA display on top of a fully functional Playstation control set. Inside you’ll find a Qualcomm Snapdragon II 8655 1GHz CPU with Graphical Processor Adreno 205, the entire device is 4.68 x 2.44 x .63 inches large, and weight sits right at 6.17 ounces (175 grams.) Not too heavy, not too light – but does it stand up to the Playstation brand?
What Chris has found with this device is that, surprise, it’s made for gamers. His first impression adds up to that fact and the idea that if you’re not into playing video games, it doesn’t really make a whole heck of a lot of sense for you to be purchasing this device. The display on this device has excellent viewing angles, but a dim brightness – “mediocre indoors and often unusable outdoors.” There’s a backlight adjustment that can be made, but no auto-brightness option, though auto-adjustment IS occurring it seems. There’s a front-facing VGA cam above the display and a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera on the back that produces nice photos, but WVGA resolution 30fps video which is not very nice.
The four Android buttons are what Chris calls “spongy,” the volume rocker is slightly difficult to operate, and the slide mechanism appears to be opening with any amount of pressure. The shoulder buttons are “bizarrely wobbly and flappy” but, as it turns out, the buttons you’ll be using primarily for gaming, aka the playstation controller buttons plus select, start, and a bonus “menu” button, are all very nice. The analog pads are appearing to be just as difficult to get used to as their on-screen counterparts, but the dimple is making it a bit easier to stay centered.
And what else is there? We’ll let you know once the USA version arrives at our doorstep. Until then, head over to SlashGear for Chris’ [full report.]
