Specs:
Hey Gamers! We know that you were waiting for XPERIA PLAY to arrive near your stores and like you we were also feeling the excitement about this phone. Now sales of this phone have started and were not that far behind to grab this one to add more in our lot. By the way we also posted about its drawbacks a week earlier. So now, let’s check this one out, what it has got and what you can do with it.
- Size: 119 x 62 x 16 mm
- Weight: 175 grams
- Phone memory: 400 MB
- Memory card support: microSD™, up to 32 GB
- Memory card included: 8GB microSD™
- Operating system: Google™ Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)
- Processor: 1 GHz Scorpion ARMv7
Hey Gamers! We know that you were waiting for XPERIA PLAY to arrive near your stores and like you we were also feeling the excitement about this phone. Now sales of this phone have started and were not that far behind to grab this one to add more in our lot. By the way we also posted about its drawbacks a week earlier. So now, let’s check this one out, what it has got and what you can do with it.
The expectations from this phone were very high and in the first look we thought that… yes this is the next Gen Gaming device for all the gamers, just by its design. The phone looks SEXY - with nice curves and a bold body… But Buddy, don’t go on the looks, watch carefully. The quality of the plastic used for building the Shell of the phone is not so good. That will create some sort of problems in the future. After paying such a high price we were expecting to have some great build quality. Screen also gave bad results when we took the phone outdoors.
Now let’s take a look at the feature of this phone i.e. The PlayStation mode. After reading about the Build Quality you must be wondering how well the PlayStation mode does. Well, it was good. The Gamepad is like PSP Go, with the direction controls, the four standard buttons, touch analogs and the shoulder buttons also. The Slide-Out mechanism of the gamepad is pretty cool. So will give a plus point for that. While playing we felt that shoulder buttons were too sensitive but we got adjusted to it after playing a few times. You get 6 games pre-installed with this phone. The one which we liked the most was CRASH! Other games didn’t have our attention but can’t say about. You can also download any game by paying the valid price for it.
Talking about the sound quality of the phone. The Sound quality will not let you down. This is a mid-ranged volume phone and it gave us decent Sound Output while we were on the speakers. The bundled headphones are also good. On the left of the phone you also get a 3.5mm audio jack, so don’t hesitate to put your favorite headsets in. You also get a volume rocker which is present between the two shoulder buttons.
Phone is powered by Scorpion Processor of 1GHz and an Adreno 205 GPU. So that takes care of the performance of the phone. But the thing which will let you down is it’s RAM. It has got just 512 MB of RAM and the worst part of it, only 400 MB of RAM is available while using an application on the phone.
Phone has got a 5 Megapixel Camera with an LED Flash. The still pictures taken by the camera in the daylight were pretty good. But again, this one has also got a bad side. Even after an LED Flash in a Dark room you will get decent quality of pictures. The Video Recording of the phone is bad. The recorded videos at resolutions below 800 x 480 were good. But video recorded at 800 x 480 disappointed us.
The Storage is not a problem at all. You can have Storage upto 32 GB via microSD card slot. The good thing is that you get a 8 GB card bundled with this phone. So you can carry lots of stuffs with you anytime, anywhere.
Now let’s take a look on the battery power of the phone. It has got a 1500mAh of battery which we thought (before testing) is good. But the results it showed disappointed us. Huh! Not again we were already tired by figuring out minus points of the Phone and here it comes again. In the Phone mode battery’s life ended up in just 24 hours! We didn’t do anything wrong. We charged the phone fully.
Yeah! We checked it and then we did usual things what a Smartphone user will do. We checked our mail, logged into our Facebook and twitter accounts, listened just a few minutes of music and browsed some pictures and web for few minutes. And rest of the time the phone was in the Stand-by. And it ended up in just 24 hours. Really disappointing! Don’t ever dare to leave your charger when you leave for your office. We thought that the battery will disappoint us again in the PlayStation Mode. But No, we were wrong (FINALLY!). The battery performed well in the Playstation mode and we played our favorite games for quite a long time.
Finally we would say that this phone has got “Something in Everything”. It disappointed in many ways. The expectations from this one were quite high and it hasn’t come up to that. We’d like to keep our Android Phone in One Pocket and PSPGo in the other. Priced so high, we’d say that if you have got bucks you can definitely give it a try, as it will not let you down while gaming. But if you don’t have that much and you were saving each a bit for this, wait for the next version of the XPERIA Play or get some other Android Device.
