Sony officially announced the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play on Sunday during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The Xperia Play is also known as the PlayStation Phone, a device which was rumoured for quite some time. Although Sony made their official announcement this weekend, the device had already made its unofficial appearance on the internet, with Engadget posting an extensive hands-on with the device.
The news of the Xperia Play emerged at a recent PlayStation Meeting at the same time as the announcement of the Next Generation Portable (NGP) aka the PlayStation Portable 2 (PSP2). Sony also announced their plans for the PlayStation Suite which is essentially the delivery platform for games on Android devices – essentially a mobile version of the PlayStation Store.
The plan is to start introducing a range of PS One classics to the service, some of which PSN account holders may already own. The immediate assumption was that users would be able to log in using their existing PSN accounts, and simply have access to any games capable of being played on their Android device.
Those hopes have been dashed by Nathan Vautier, managing director for Sony Ericsson UK and Ireland, who confirmed to Gamespot UK that content previously purchased through the PlayStation Store will have to be purchased again for use on the Xperia Play.
“[Xperia Play owners] will have to re-purchase the games, so it’s not totally integrated,” said Vautier. “I think the exciting thing is that there are games which people are very, very aware of,” he said. I doubt that being aware of a game you already own is much of a selling point for the Xperia Play device.
The Xperia Play comes with a slide-out gamepad styled after the trademark PlayStation controller. There is a touch sensitive pad that emulates the use of twin analog sticks. The Xperia play has a 10-centimetre screen and is powered by a 1Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8655 CPU, an Adreno 205 GPU, 512MB RAM, and 1GB ROM.
Discuss the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play on the MyGaming forum.
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