ORLANDO—Verizon Wireless's version of the PlayStation Phone, otherwise known as the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, spent some time in public at the CTIA Wireless trade show today. It's a solid gaming phone and an elegant Android handset, but after playing a few games I had some concerns about its performance.
First, the good parts: as we saw in our hands-on with the Xperia Play's European model at the MWC show last month, the Xperia Play is a touchscreen Android-powered smartphone whose screen slides up to show a full range of PlayStation controls. There are cursor keys, action buttons, two analog trackpads and even two "bumper" buttons on top.
The phone will come preloaded with some top-notch games, such as Madden 11, The Sims 3, Asphalt 6 and Star Battalion HD. More PlayStation games will be available through both the Android Market and Verizon's own app store, which bills purchases to your phone bill.
The U.S. Xperia Play ditches Sony Ericsson's performance-sucking Timescape overlay for a simple, clean interface that looks very close to stock Google Android Gingerbread. This isn't stock Android, of course—Sony Ericsson put some extra hooks in there to support the PlayStation controls—but it looks and acts like it, which will make many people happy.
So how's the gameplay? That's the real question, and the answer is: almost great. The PlayStation games are rich, to be sure, and the controls are much more convenient than standard phone-game controls. But I saw occasional jerkiness when playing Asphalt 6. In a portable game system, I'd expect complete and total smoothness, but it looked like occasionally, some sort of background process was interrupting the game's flow. Hopefully, Sony Ericsson can work this out before launch.
Verizon Wireless doesn't have a firm release date or price for this phone, other than to say it's coming soon.