GUYISM EXCLUSIVE: Sony Xperia hands-on review
Matt Hawkins 
Last week, E3 offered everyone a peek into gaming’s future: Sony’s next handheld, the PlayStation Vita, the obvious successor to the PlayStation Portable. The thing is, the next iteration of a handheld is out in the streets this very second, one of which actually arrived shortly before the big show.
I’m talking about the almost mythic PlayStation Phone of course. Such a device has been dreamed of for years, so it’s certainly odd that it’s actually here, hardly anyone has noticed. Okay, maybe not: the iPhone is the undisputed king of the portable gaming ring and comes instantly to mind, so unless it has some totally unique ability, the being about to output 3D visuals for example, your handheld sounds boring already. Still, does this other PSP, officially called the Xperia Play live up to what everyone was hoping and expecting, once upon a time?
Right up upfront, it needs to be clarified that the following review is mostly concerned with the game-playing aspects of the device. For an actual, truly exhaustive review of the phone as a whole, please refer elsewhere. I had a unit for two weeks, and all I really did was play games mostly. Though I’ll touch upon various other things, here and there, as you’ll see.
HARDWARE
I suppose it also needs to be stated that I’m a total Apple/iPhone fanboy. My preferred gaming on the go solution is easily the DSi, but I turn to my iPhone far more frequently since its just always handy, given how it’s always by my side. That being said, while I do love many iPhone games, I’m still not super comfortable with the interface, and simply prefer buttons at the end of the day.
Obviously the biggest selling point is the PlayStaton stylized buttons. While they don’t offer as much give as a regular Dual Shock’s counterpart, the face buttons more than do the job. The shoulder buttons are rather tiny, but not too much so, and also somewhat mushy, yet to a totally acceptable degree. The most curious part is how the analogue sticks are handled, via completely touch-based surfaces, but I’ll get into that in a bit. The entire thing comes and goes via a very sturdy, well-constructed hinge mechanism that feels rock-solid, like it’ll be just fine after much use.
As for the design of the phone itself, not bad at all. About the size of an iPhone, just a little bigger and thicker, yet certainly still fits in a person’s pocket with ease. I found the placement of the headphone jack a bit odd, but otherwise, the build quality is excellent, and up there with Sony Ericsson’s usual high standards. Back to the retractable part and the overall feel while playing a game, it’s similar to the “what were they thinking smoking when they came up with it?” PSP Go, but not more solid, not as chintzy.
There are negatives however. Like the screen, which is fairly dim and dark. Boosting it up to the max setting does very little to offset how dark and overly contrasted everything looks. Audio-wise, the output sans headphone is rather poor. I’m not expecting a boombox level of sound, but I honestly thought my phone’s speaker was broken for a while there.
SOFTWARE
This is where my iOS bias slowly comes into the picture, sorry. The Xperia runs the latest version of Android, I think? After a reasonable amount of research, I still have no idea of its place in the grand scheme of things. Anyhow, it’s an instant reminder of why the walled garden of the iPhone kinda blows, but is mostly a not such a bad thing. I was instantly overwhelmed and confused by things I had assumed would work, but didn’t. True there’s much hand-holding on the iPhone, and you can’t really exploit the hardware as one would like, the price of being able to do whatever on an Android handset (which is not necessarily true in this particular device’s instance) is the overabundance of options and flat out inconsistencies.
The fact that there’s three separate “stores” confused the hell out of me (the Android Marketplace, Verizon’s own branded store, and Sony Ericsson’s means of getting Xperia specific software) and I consider myself a technically savvy individual. The hardware certainly does not help; in addition to the PlayStation buttons, the screen is touch enabled. Some software and games support one or other, sometimes both. But never always; it’s super inconsistent and supremely confusing after a while.
The OS itself felt nice and snappy, not quite on par with iOS, but certainly good enough. Any piece of software that was by Google felt great; their version of Google Chat, and the lack of a proper iPhone counterpart, still upsets me greatly. But downloaded, third party software, primarily games had to connect to a server to make sure that I was an authorized user, and that was a serious pain in the ass, because it affected launch time. Not by a crazy degree, but enough for me to get sick off real quick like.
As for making phone calls, it works just as well as you’d expect any Verizon handset. I only had one hard to decipher call, which was with a buddy on an AT&T iPhone. This might be more of a hardware issue, but I found the battery life to be fantastic, which is generally thanks to the operating system and firmware, so Android beats iOS in that department at least.
GAMES
Time to address the whole point of the device and where it stumbles the most. The one thing people are interested in hearing about is PlayStation emulation, and its absolutely flawless. Crash Bandicoot was included in my test unit, and it moved plus looked awesome (especially the latter since the screen, while dark, is far more crisp and high resolution when compared to the PSP’s, with a superior refresh rate to boot). Unfortunately, Crash is the ONLY PlayStation game out on the platform for the time being. During my two weeks with the thing, I checked the Xperia marketplace constantly, hoping for something new, and was disappointed. Isn’t the whole point of a PlayStation Phone to have, you know, PlayStation games?
Back to what I said about not being able to do whatever one likes after all; there was once a PSX emulator for Android that ran pretty much every PSone title, but got yanked from the marketplace due to the Xperia’s arrival. Which sucks and all, but at least give folks more than one official reason for such a move. So what’s left? There are other games, stuff that was originally designed for the Android’s touch interface, but with button support. This makes the portable version of Pac-Man Championship Edition far more playable (yet nearly as fast and responsive as the XBLA version, but better than just with the screen), and I guess Assassin’s Creed as well. The funny thing is, both allows for support for the analogue touch pad, whereas Crash Bandicoot, an actual PlayStation game, did not.
Still, having a shiny new Xperia Play, but having nothing but non-exclusive iPhone games with the benefit of buttons is practically an insult. Funny enough, the best thing I played on the thing was a Bruce Lee fighting game, which might be the most polished portable fighter I’ve ever played, one that definitely couldn’t rely upon touchscreen alone.
The fact of the matter is, it’s bad news that only one PSone game has been released thus far, with absolutely no word when anything else is due. When one remembers how poorly supported the PSP Go was, its absolutely not a given that an entire catalogue will necessarily be available in the future. Once again, sure you can play all the countless other Android games on the same device, but considering how all over the place and random hardware support is (an issue that was the case well before the Xperia Play came to be I’m afraid), you just have a gaming platform with zero identity. Actually, being able to interact with the screen while also relying upon the buttons reminds me of the upcoming PSVita: all around confusion and lack of focus.
As history has proven, a game system can only truly succeed if the offerings are specifically tailor made for it. Given how the main selling point of the PlayStation Phone is a bunch of games that have been around forever… one has to wonder if the Xperia Play is too little, too late, or no point at all.
follow guyism:
Other Stories You Might LIke
7 of the hottest things a woman can wear
15 celebrities who are older than you thought
7 times when it’s okay for a man to cry
comment on this story
blog comments powered by Disqus