Xperia Play

~ the obit ~

xperia play was a phone for people who really wanted a portable playstation that was also a phone. that was not my crowd. by spring 2011 i was on an android phone with a normal slab form factor, the idea of carrying a slider with mechanical gamepad buttons attached to the bottom did not sound like a phone i wanted to put in my pocket. the launch coverage on engadget and donanimhaber treated it as a curiosity rather than a contender.

the leaks started in late 2010 under the "playstation phone" rumor name, and the official announce came at mobile world congress on february 13 2011. it shipped in europe on april 1, then north america on may 26 through verizon as an exclusive carrier deal. japan got the unit at the end of october. the launch lineup was around fifty titles, mostly the kind of mid-tier psp ports and freshly-built android games that publishers had handy at the moment.

i remember the verge and ars verdicts came out at almost the same time and said almost the same thing. the slider mechanism felt good, the buttons felt fine, the phone underneath was a year behind on specs. android 2.3 gingerbread, a 1ghz single-core snapdragon, 512mb of ram, a 4-inch lcd at 854 by 480, a 5-megapixel rear camera with no flash worth mentioning. compared to the galaxy s ii sitting next to it on the same shelf it was an underpowered phone with a gimmick stapled on.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the playstation suite store was the part sony ericsson wanted everyone to care about, a curated catalog of psp-era games re-licensed for android with controls mapped to the gamepad. the actual launch list included crash bandicoot as the first psone game on the device, plus a slice of gameloft's android catalog with controller patches. the press treated this as a beta of what sony might do with mobile gaming next.

in turkey the device arrived through turkcell and the unlocked grey market around may '11 for around 1,000 lira before contract. the price was the same as a galaxy s ii. people who actually went and tried it at the store mostly noticed that the slider added thickness that felt out of place in a phone that was already half a year behind the design curve. it sold, just not in numbers that justified another version.

~ the cracks ~

the real problem was the gap between what the phone promised and what the catalog delivered. on launch day there were maybe ten games that actually used the physical controls in a useful way. by autumn the playstation-suite library was growing slowly because sony had not opened the floodgates to third-party emulators or to the wider psp catalog. an iphone with a good touch-controlled game like infinity blade was a better gaming phone in practice, since the touchscreen games were targeting the iphone first.

on the corporate side sony ericsson itself was already in trouble. ericsson wanted out of the joint venture. sony bought the other half for €1.05 billion in october '11 with the deal closing in february '12. the xperia play was caught mid-handoff. when sony rebranded everything as sony mobile in spring '12 the play got a couple of vague slides in roadmap presentations, then a confirmation in august that android 4 ice cream sandwich was not coming and no successor was planned. that was effectively the obituary.

~ what it became ~

the playstation suite the phone was supposed to anchor became playstation mobile, which sony tried to grow as a cross-device store for vita and select android phones through 2013 and 2014. it never got past curiosity status. sony shut playstation mobile in july 2015 and the games stopped working when the certificates expired. the xperia play's library went with it for the ones that had not already been sideloaded onto custom roms.

the device itself stuck around as a homebrew curiosity. emulator front-ends loved it, snes and genesis games on a phone with real buttons was the use case it was actually built for, just not the one the launch marketing wanted. as the only playstation-branded phone ever made it has a kind of museum value now. the n-gage is the cousin everyone mentions in the same breath. n-gage at least had two iterations and a couple of games people remember.

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