The Xperia Play feels like it’s been around forever given the amount of leaks we’ve seen over the past few months. With that in mind I attended Sunday’s launch in Barcelona expecting to be somewhat underwhelmed. I was pleasantly surprised to the contrary …
The first thing to say about the Xperia Play is that there are two very distinct aspects to it, the hardware and the software. The hardware of course has been public knowledge, unofficially at least, for months now, indeed it’s probably one of the most leaked handsets to have ever seen the light of day. Sunday threw up nothing new in terms of the physical handset itself, but that’s fine because the hardware is actually solid.
As a handheld device it’s pretty good. The device feels great in the hand, not too heavy, not too light, but just right. It’s well balanced so that gaming with it doesn’t feel awkward or strained, all in all it felt like what it is being pitched as, a gaming device.
I’ll get into the finer points of the hardware in a later article, but suffice to say for now that the handset feels fantastic and that it very much comes across as a dedicated gaming device physically and not just a phone with some gaming controls tacked on.
On the other side of the coin we had the software, the actual games themselves. Now before I get into this let me state the following caveat: this is a new platform for Sony Ericsson, indeed Android gaming in general is pretty much still in its infancy so bear that in mind.
The games on the demo units were ok and I use that word deliberately because they were by no means bad, but at the same time I couldn’t help but get the feeling that, for the event at least, they could have made an effort to have a real stand out title available that showcased what this platform could do. A major title, Grand Theft Auto, for example, might have attracted more attention and ‘wowed’ the crowd a bit more.
I’m not trying to be critical for the sake of finding fault, but doing the rounds of the room on the night there seemed to be a consensus amongst many that whilst the device was great to play with and the games on offer were, in all fairness, good fun, there was just that sense of the games not being ‘grade A’ … yet. The sort of titles on offer were Sims 3 and Fifa 10 (10, not 11).
Granted that the games we saw represented only a small number of the 50 titles that will be present at launch and let me underscore that the games I tried were genuinely fun, but they do also need a lot more big titles to really draw in the gaming crowd. To be fair they are making an effort to get the industry onboard and they already have 20 games publishers signed up.
I was actually surprised by how little was said about the software side of things, it wasn’t really mentioned to any great extent during the presentation itself. That’s strange given how big this could become given Android’s scope, but we’ll get into that in a future article.
The bottom line is the device itself is pretty awesome, it looks the part, it feels the part, and despite some comments about it not being multi-core, etc it seems to deliver the goods in terms of performance. It has enormous potential, but note that word ‘potential’, it’s by no means a done deal yet. They need more publishers onboard, they need big name titles, they need to get other manufacturers using the platform. The thing is all that is doable if Sony Ericsson (and Sony) want it to happen.
For the first time in God knows how long Sony Ericsson is ahead of an emerging trend and it has a product out that is actually desirable and perhaps more importantly for Sony Ericsson a product that is being talked about in terms other than disparaging. This could be the one that heralds the return of the Sony Ericsson we love, they just have to want it badly enough.
I’ll be looking at the hardware and the software in more detail soon …
Źródło: Xperia Play: First Thoughts
Category: Sony Ericsson | Tags: None
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