After months of rumours, Sony Ericsson has finally confirmed it will launch its XPERIA Play Android smartphone — dubbed the 'PlayStation phone' — in the coming months.
Check out our guide to other top Sony Ericsson phones.
Officially confirmed via a commercial at the NFL's Super Bowl, and then unveiled at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in Barcelona, Spain, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play features a 4in multitouch display, a touch-sensitive joystick, a D-pad and four of the PlayStation's famous control buttons; triangle, square, circle and X.
PlayStation games on the XPERIA Play will be downloaded through the 'PlayStation Suite', an online PlayStation store for Android phones. Sony hopes the XPERIA Play will be the first of many "PlayStation certified" Android phones to hit the market; Sony will test each device that applies to become PlayStation certified, to ensure the phone will offer an adequate gaming experience to users.
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play will be powered by a 1GHz processor and 400MB of RAM, and will run the latest 2.3 Gingerbread version of Google's Android platform. Gingerbread offers a revamped keyboard, better copy and paste, improved power management, and a slicker user interface as improvements over previous versions of Android.
Rumours of a "PlayStation phone" first circulated last year, after a Wall Street Journal interview with Sony Ericsson's CEO.
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play hasn't officially been announced for launch in Australia, but it is expected to be released down under in the coming months.
Check out a video of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play in action below.
