Hands On With The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play for AT&T
AT&T on Tuesday unveiled a version of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play gaming phone for its network, saying the "PlayStation Phone" would come to AT&T's network either "soon" or by the end of the year.
The Xperia Play for AT&T is very similar to the model we already reviewed for Verizon, but it has some noticeable differences. The phones have the same body, the same gaming controls, the same 800-by-480 screen and the same 1-GHz Qualcomm processor. Both phones play Xperia Play-exclusive games - more than 100 games will be optimized for the phone's control pad by the end of the year, a Sony Ericsson Rep told me.
But the AT&T Play has a slightly different skin over Android 2.3.4, offering the option of Sony Ericsson's Timescape, a rolling cascade of social networking information, along with somewhat different icons from Verizon's model. Sony Ericsson also provides a Facebook-based "media discovery" app that the people doing the demo couldn't tell me much about, and AT&T's various bloatware apps, of course, will come preloaded on the phone.
One game will be exclusive to AT&T's model, Sony Ericsson said: a new version of Dungeon Defenders 2.
The AT&T Play, unlike the Verizon model, will be "4G," a Sony Ericsson rep said. But it's unclear what that means; AT&T considers a very wide range of technologies to be 4G, including some (such as HSPA 14.4) that everyone else, including me, think are firmly 3G. The new phone also comes in blue as well as the existing black color.
I played with the Xperia Play for a little while and found it to be very similar to Verizon's unit. It's still a thick, plasticky midrange Android phone with a grand standout feature in that game controller. The game controller still makes gaming easier than on any competing phone, even though the Xperia Play's Qualcomm Adreno 205 GPU is behind today's cutting edge.
Sony Ericsson and AT&T didn't announce a price for the new Xperia Play. Sony Ericsson did, however, confirm that no version is headed to Sprint or T-Mobile, at least for now.
