Sony Ericsson officially announced the Android-based PlayStation phone, the Xperia Play, via a television commercial that aired during the Super Bowl game on Sunday.
Super Bowl commercials go for a large amount of cash, and technical manufacturers have been using them to make big announcements since 1984, when Apple showed their ”Big Brother” commercials for the Macintosh.
Sony-Ericsson’s commercial Sunday revealed a back-alley surgeon putting opposable thumbs onto Google’s Android robot, followed by the tagline “Android is ready to play,” and then showing pictures of the handset.
The Xperia Play has a touch screen and slide-out PlayStation controls, plus four navigation buttons on the left and x, square, circle and triangle buttons on the right hand side. The smart phone is certified by PlayStation, meaning it will work with the Android 2.3 operating system and can operate some of the original PlayStation one games.
The PlayStation Certified branding is a part of Sony’s PlayStation Suite, and was first announced Jan. 27. It will have a store in which customers can download content and a new game development environment. By the end of this year, more device manufacturers will be allowed to certify their smart phones and tablet computers.
The official specs for the Xperia Play have yet to be revealed, but rumored specs show a 4.2-inch screen, which is the same size as the Xperia Arc, which was announced earlier. The handset could also have a 1GHz processor and a five-megapixel camera.
The rising popularity of smart phones, and the changeover to downloadable games, has changed the way games are being sold, and is putting a lot of pressure on old-fashioned sellers such as Sony and Nintendo.
Only time will tell if Sony Ericsson will find a market in-between regular smart phones and the dedicated gaming devices, including the soon to come Nintendo 3DS, and there are those that think that they won’t. When you combine two different categories of products, you can end up compromising one or the other, so says Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. Most casual gamers will more than likely find that a normal smart phone should be enough and the majority of core gamers will still want a normal gaming device, she added.
How successful the Xperia Play will be will also be determined by how available good games are, according to Richard Webb, directing analyst at market research company Infonetics.
Sony Ericsson will give more details on their new gaming-centered Android-based smart phone during a news conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Feb. 13.
