By now, you've probably heard that the Playstation Phone is real. While it won't exactly play your existing PSP games right out of the box, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play does seem to have some great things going for it.
The last time we saw a phone dedicated for gaming, it was the Nokia N-Gage. And I loved mine for the two years I had it. This one looks even better, sporting a slider form factor with dedicated gaming controls based on the PSP Go (a D-pad, two analog touch pads, a pair of shoulder buttons, and that familiar assembly of circle, cross, square and triangle buttons), aside from the usual motion gaming hardware that currently come with most smartphones. Dimensions seem just right, too, at 4.7 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches and a weight of 6.2 ounces.
Details of the Xperia Play include a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen (480 x 854 resolution), a 5.1 megapixel camera module, a front-facing VGA webcam, aGPS, WiFi, 3G with HSPA, Bluetooth, DLNA and microSD card expansion (up to 32GB). A 1 GHz Snapdragon processor and an Adreno GPU provide the muscle to get all those games running at a "silky smooth 60 fps" frame rate.
Android 2.3 Gingerbread comes onboard, along with all of Google's usual apps and services. Naturally, it can play regular Android games (and ships a bunch of them preloaded), complete with local multiplayer support over Wi-Fi hotspot. According to Sony Ericsson, they're also throwing in a "legendary" PSone game, with access to a lot more over the PlayStation Suite store.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play will launch in March and will be available stateside from Verizon.
[SonyEricsson]