The interface on the Xperia Play looks pretty similar to its cousin, the Xperia Arc. By default, there are five Home screens to populate as you wish, with a persistent dock-like bar along the bottom with space enough for four customisable icons and a static menu launcher.
The Contacts and Phone apps take up the right two slots, with the left two given over to the Media folder and Messaging. We fast swapped out the Media file for the Browser, given that one of the five Home screens is already filled with widgets for the Gallery and Music apps, but you can hone this bar as you wish.
Tapping the centre icon on the dock brings up a list of apps to add to your Home screens, and all you need do is press and hold one to drag it into a free slot. Handily, the background lines behind it will turn green when you've found a valid place, so organising is fast and intuitive.
One minor quibble we do have is that you'll have to bypass this system and go via the external menu key to place widgets, folders and shortcuts, which seems a little inconsistent and caused us some early confusion.
By default, the centre screen is almost entirely given over to the Timescape widget, which acts like a stream of postcards, each presenting Facebook and Twitter updates as well as text messages. Much like the Friend Stream system we've seen on recent HTC models, each of these acts as a slick starting point for finding the content you want.
Other screens tend to be more open, but notably there's one screen dedicated to gaming, with a half-screen widget for the PlayStation Pocket app and a link to the Android Market to buy more games.
All you need do to navigate between screens is swipe left and right, but there's also an exploded view of all your widgets that you can access by pinching. Tap on a widget and you'll be taken to its resident Home screen.
We're not huge fans of this system, since it neglects to show you apps as well, making it selectively useful, but if you're a widget-fiend then it's perfect.
Scrolling left and right between Home screens is generally quick and fluid, though. However, we've found it can be jerky just after waking the device from its slumber in the mornings. On the flip side, we were impressed by the speed of the scrolling Rolodex-style widgets (as well as the PS Pocket, there's one for the Gallery, too), making them eminently usable.
Taken as a whole, the system doesn't quite gel together as we'd like, but its not hard to learn to work around its quirks.
Contacts are accessed through the icon found by default in the dock and the menu. You can also access the phone dialler, call log and favourites from the menu at the bottom.
Importing our contacts to the phone proved as simple as providing our Google log-in details, and there's a wizard in place to help you get contacts onto the phone in various other ways too.
With your contacts loaded up, you'll see them presented in a fairly standard alphabetical list, which you can filter in a couple of ways, but not reorder.
The presentation of contacts is stylish, if a touch counter-intuitive where it matters. Primarily, it's the main info page for each contact we find awkwardly inconsistent. To send a message, you tap the messaging icon, while making a call means tapping a phone number from the list of possible numbers below.
We'd prefer either clear messaging and call icons in a prominent position, or a menu asking what you'd like to do when you press a number. Ideally, both.
Also, you can't set a number as the primary one, so you'll have to enter a custom field to make differentiating between, say, two mobile numbers easier. When you have a friend with a personal phone and a work one, that's unnecessarily tricky to work out.
Still, the rest of the page is good, and more handy pages are added as information becomes available, showing, say, Facebook statuses or your message history in conversation bubbles, which we liked.
Adding contacts is simple to do from the main list too, with a dedicated button in the top-right of the screen.
Finally, joining duplicate contacts into a single entry is as simple as pressing and holding on one entry and then choosing the appropriate menu option.
We're pleased to say the Xperia Play is very competent in-call too. The dialler is simplistic, with no support for smart dialling, but the big screen does make it easy to key in what you want.
Once we'd established a line, the connection quality was good, and didn't drop at all during our calls. We'd say the volume could stand to go a little higher for those calls when you're fighting inner-city traffic noise, but it's not a big deal.
One thing that's worth noting is that letting the handset speaker drift up and slightly away from your ear during calls will result in dramatically diminishing volume. It's more sensitive than a number of handsets we've used, and a little frustrating.
Speakerphone calls were fine on our end, but the person on the other side of the line did detect a little echo.
Messaging on the Xperia Play follows the basic-but-competent motif. Fire up the app and you'll see a list of your current messages, plus drafts and a big ol' New Message button at the top of the screen.
Tapping any message summons the conversation view, which is presented in translucent speech bubbles on a blue-black background. Each message is timestamped to make trawling back through a conversation easier.
You can also compose a message from this view by pressing the white 'Write Message' bubble at the bottom, and add photos or video to your texts by clicking the icon that appears to its right in portrait view. Handily, there are options to record new media specifically for sending here, too.
The keyboard isn't the stock Android one, but it's pretty similar with a lot of keys crammed at the bottom of the screen in portrait view – we're not really sure why we needed a Menu key when there's this little real estate.
Flip the phone over and you'll be treated to a much more spacious version of the same, which is far more comfortable on the long, thin screen.
Typing is pretty standard, but you can only change the autocorrect options for the current word you're typing, so you can find hilarious 'correction-ese' slips in. At least you can press and hold words to select them when this happens and fix them.
Building up your catalogue of lingo is simple, too. You add words to the user dictionary by clicking on them to override a correction once, after which they're saved to use again.
Email is similar, with a list view of your inbox, and it makes use of the same keyboard when writing a message, but with a few extra fields and an attachments button.
Flip the phone into landscape view, though, and clicking on any message in your inbox presents it in a little frame on the right-hand of the screen, which makes skimming through your emails pleasingly simple.
The goodness of the app makes it a real shame the Xperia Play didn't deem it necessary to inform us of when new mail had arrived, which seems like a pretty big oversight. There's no widget for the Email app either, so there's really no way of knowing what's landed in your inbox unless you go and check.
The now-familiar Gmail app is on-board too, and does a far better job of keeping you updated via the notifications bar.
This is what you came for, right? How does the Xperia Play hold up as a gaming device and can it compete in the same league as the portable big boys?
Well, controls are the lifeblood of any console, dictating how the software experience plays out (if you'll excuse the pun), and the Xperia Play's are a real mix.
The D-pad and familiar PlayStation face buttons (circle, square, triangle and cross) are excellent, delivering a definite click and a really pleasing action. They're nicer on the fingers than the 3DS equivalents too, and a refreshing change from on-screen controls.
The dual thumbpads are far less laudable, though. The degree to which they worked varied a fair bit depending on what we were playing, but the core problem we had with them was always the same – they're too picky and there's not enough feedback.
Yes, there's a little metal circle at the dead centre of each one to help you orient yourself, and they're set in a dimple in the face of the device to let you know when you've strayed beyond their bounds, but even with those aids we found accurate control a struggle.
We'd often strike out at an angle slightly off what we really wanted, walk when we'd meant to run or overshoot the pads with half our thumb, causing plenty of confusion.
We have a few theories about why this is, but part of it is that the pads are quite small, meaning every little movement is a big deal. Also, they're not good at understanding quick changes of pace. As we said, picky.
We've found dual-stick shooters on the iPhone far more forgiving, perhaps because you can see where your thumb is in relation to events. And the thumbpads can't hold a candle to the circle pad on the Nintendo 3DS.
Then there's the shoulder buttons, which are a wee bit mushy for our tastes. Of even more import is that your digits are prone to rubbing on the back edges of the screen. This made us hold the Xperia Play awkwardly at first, but we did find a comfortable position after a while.
The Start and Select keys are good, as is the dedicated menu button. However, the latter seems a little superfluous, given it only replicates the function of other buttons on the device.
The slide mechanism is an unqualified success, though. It's rock solid, moving the pad up or down with a satisfying snick. The screen stays put with no wobble or flex too.
The dual-personality nature of the Xperia Play is continued in its gaming software. There are two apps that serve as launching stages: the confusingly titled Xperia Play, which is effectively a housing point for Android Market games that work with the device, and the PlayStation Pocket, which handles the honeypot PS One ports we were actually excited to play.
Bizarrely, it's the Xperia Play app that starts by default when you slide out the pad – the PlayStation Pocket is found in a Home screen widget and lurking in the menu. We've yet to find a way of switching them over and the inconsistent approach is cumbersome.
Our test handset came with five games preinstalled: Crash Bandicoot as the sole PS One offering, with FIFA 10, Bruce Lee, Star Battalion and The Sims 3 apps to finish the package. The latter barely benefits from being on the handheld at all, but some of the former will make good showcases for the hardware come launch day.
We're conflicted about the Xperia Play as a gaming package. The controller section, while far from perfect, is a significant step up from playing on a touchscreen phone. But with so many niggles and the higher barrier to entry of the price, it's hard to see who this will suit.
If gaming on the go is important to you, we reckon you should wait for the NGP or go grab a 3DS. Having tested the Xperia Play and Ninty's console side-by-side, we can safely say the latter offers a better gaming experience, even if you never turn the 3D effect on.
With the Xperia Play, obviously the main media concern is the gaming side of things. However, that's not to say that other multimedia options are left in the cold, and the device proves more than capable when it comes to music and movies.
8GB of card-based storage plus the 400MB of internal memory provides plenty of room to get you started, and you can swap in a card up to 32GB in size if your media collection is sizable.
The Music player is minimalist, but none the worse for that. You can control it via either the handy Home screen widget or through the main menu. Upon entering, you'll see the current track's album artwork front and centre, with a large play/pause button and smaller track skipping keys to either side.
At the lower edge is an easy-to-access slider that enables you to scrub through your track, handily displaying a prominent time reference in the upper portion of the screen as long as your finger's on the slider.
Below that sit three icons to access your music collection, get online information about your currently playing track and see a list of what's currently playing.
It's all exactly as we'd expect, pleasingly responsive and well thought out.
Press the Menu key and you'll be able to access a set of equaliser presets (no custom option, unfortunately) as well as set the playing track as your ringtone. Neat.
Special mention must also go to the handset's two built-in speakers, which give clear, enjoyable stereo sound without the tinniness that accompanies most mobiles. We weren't big fans of the included earbuds, though, given that they seemed to contrive to communicate every cable movement and rustle directly into our cranial tissues, regardless of the rubber tips we used.
Movies also benefit from the great stereo sound, and we found the four-inches of screen real estate put to good use. Again, the player itself is simple yet efficient, with simple skip buttons, the obligatory play/pause key and a timeline appearing on a grey bar when you tap the screen.
There's none of the jerkiness that can accompany fast panning, but some of the images are a little fuzzy when in fullscreen mode.
Aside from the weight of the unit, it's comfy enough to hold in the hand for a while too, so watching an episode or two on the train is entirely feasible if you're all gamed out.
Finally for now, let's touch on the Gallery. This is another slick-looking app that's clearly been the focus of attention. Enter the main screen and you'll see files for your pictures and movies laid out in pleasingly messy stacks.
Tap one stack of, say, pictures and you'll see it expanded out into a wall of thumbnails. From here, you can select one to see all up close and personal, or use as the starting point for a slideshow. You can also access basic editing and sharing options by tapping the menu key.
One
issue we did have is that the Xperia Play got confused when we took new
photos with the camera, showing us the same folder of shots twice
instead of the folder of images on our memory card and the new one. It
had us worried for a moment until we quit out and returned, although we
couldn't replicate the problem again.
With Google's might behind the Xperia Play's OS, it's surprising that we've found the web browsing as mediocre as we have.
On our test unit we had the option of connecting via Wi-Fi or 3G/HSDPA. Getting our Wi-Fi set up was simple, and handled neatly by the Xperia Play's set-up wizard. All we had to do was enter our password and we were away.
So far, so good, but once connected we found the stock browser hardly blistering in pace. Sites are accessed quickly enough, but scrolling around the full BBC homepage proved prone to stuttering. The pinch-to-zoom functionality was decidedly jerky too.
In a similar vein, text reflowing is merely okay, requiring a double tap to make the device get the job done once you've zoomed in.
Using the little plus and minus zoom keys on the screen worked far better for reading a news site in both regular a mobile formats, reflowing text as we zoomed. But these can be annoying too, and we had an issue where one key disappeared behind website content.
That said, Flash support has been promising, with our few test sites loading quickly and playing well.
The bookmarks system is praiseworthy as well, offering a little icon by your entered URL to log your favourite sites. Enter the pane accessed by the menu key and the top-left square of the screen is dedicated to a creating a bookmark of the current site, while all the other entries show the sites in your collection in handy thumbnails. You can opt for a list instead if you prefer.
Similar lists exist for your most viewed pages, which is a handy secondary jumping-on point, and recent history.
It's by no means awful, but the jerky nature of what we experienced is a far cry from browsing on the iPhone 4 or other Android phones such as the LG Optimus 2X. It's disappointing and really impacted how we felt about the browsing experience.
Toting a five-megapixel camera, the Xperia Play can produce beautiful images. Unfortunately, once again it suffers from inconsistent software muddying the offering.
Don't get us wrong, there are loads of options, including a host of white balance settings, scene modes, exposure control, colour effects and quality settings. Plus, on the hardware front, there's a decent flash.
What the Xperia Play lacks, oddly, is a zoom function, at least that we could find. We tried double tapping, pinching, scoured the menus, but nada. Also, there seems to be no way of picking out what you want to focus on beyond the auto, infinity and macro options. It's a real disappointment, because as you'll see, the camera itself is great.
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CLOSE UP: We got this sharp image using the macro mode. The colours are vivid and some of the detail on the central flower's petals is amazing
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CLOUDY DAY: Wider shots are a little more prone to fuzziness. The overcast sky is slightly overexposed here, too
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WIDE SHOT: The central area of grass here is quite pixellated at full size. Still, the colour rendition is good
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MOVEMENT: The Xperia Play handles moving subjects reasonably well. It's a shame we couldn't have focused more and zoomed in on the central subject, though
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CONTRAST: The
Xperia Play has failed to capture all the detail in this dark bronze
lion against a brighter sky, but it's done really well considering that
we took this shot to tax it
