Cell phone service providers are evil. Or at least unethical. The excitement of going from an old clamshell phone to a fancy-shmancy "smart" phone is quickly tarnished by the service fees that come with the mere privilege of owning such an advanced device. When I chucked my enV 3 (a very inferior successor in the unfortunately downward spiral from the amazing original enV) in the phone recycle box, I could barely contain my joy at finally upgrading to an Android phone. The mandatory $30 smartphone tax on top of my regular monthly bill hurt, though I at least had unlimited data.
That is, until they took that away from everyone else, at which time I was grandfathered into keeping it. Until, of course, I had to upgrade, when Verizon yanked the unlimited data away so fast my head spun, leaving me with the same monthly tax and a measly 2GB of data to show for it. In the age of cloud computing, when we have so much virtual storage space that we move entire operating systems to running in it because we can't figure out what else to use it for, how do companies like Verizon get away with charging an afternoon's worth of Netflix streaming for the same price as a basic home Internet package?
I digress, for now. The immoral business practices of such companies aren't exactly relevant to the Xperia Play, which is what I want to talk about today.
The Phone
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| The phone with the gamepad section slid out. |
The first Android phone I ever had was the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play R800x (Verizon version). I will admit that the reason I bought it was primarily because Minecraft: Pocket Edition was going to release exclusively to this device first. But it had lots of other great features, such as:
- At the time, the latest version of Android - 2.3.3 Gingerbread, with promises of it being updated all the way to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
- Physical keys designed specifically for gaming, including never-before-seen analog touchpads to simulate the twin sticks found on Playstation controllers.
- Six included games, including a port of Crash Bandicoot from the original Playstation console, to support promises of a large library of similarly ported PSX games coming soon.
- Certification for Android games that were "optimized for Xperia Play", supporting the hardware and physical gaming controls.
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| A cropped macro photo I took with the phone. |
Besides the out-of-the-box features from that list, I was also initially impressed with the quality of its rear-facing camera, which gave some decent macro shots for its 5.1 megapixels. All seemed well, at first, until I really began poking around the phone's operating system and learning more about its capabilities.
The Problems
First, I noticed that it was full of Verizon apps. If you have Verizon, and I'm sure this is true for other carriers that do this, you know that the carrier-provided apps are essentially useless. If they do something you want or need, chances are good you'll find a better version in the app marketplace. This immediately led to two other problems: 1) these apps, and several others that came with the phone, could not be uninstalled; and 2) they took up a fuck-ton of space. The phone comes with 512MB of space, which is an astonishingly small amount considering over 300MB of that is taken up by pre-installed apps. The majority of apps available on the marketplace, even today, do not allow being run from an external SD card.
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| At least there was enough room for Minecraft: Pocket Edition. |
Space is enough of a concern for any avid gamer, but what really matters is speed and power. While I generally had few problems running games, 3D or otherwise, it was still to my dismay to see that the phone only had a single-core processor at 1GHz. To compare, the HTC Evo 3D released two months later than the Xperia Play, but featured a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of memory. Other, similarly more powerful phones also existed at the time. You can say "well, the Xperia Play was different", but that's exactly my point. For a gaming-specific phone, it should have been running more cutting edge technology. Gamers will pay for it, and you can look at Sony's PlayStation 3 launch as evidence. As it is, this phone had little forethought to future-proofing, a major blunder for a console manufacturer.
The version of Android that came installed was pretty stable, but after a few months, Verizon pushed the 2.3.4 update. Once it was installed, I ran into one of the biggest software issues this device has ever had, which has not been resolved to this day. The connection indicator icons in the system bar across the top no longer turned green. Ever. This meant that it was not actually making a full connection to Google's services, which in turn meant that sync, GTalk, and several other applications were no longer working correctly. At least this update finally released the system lock on Madden NFL '11, so it could be uninstalled; oddly, none of the other pre-loaded games were given the same treatment.
Lies and Damned Lies
While the aforementioned connection problem was irritating, I was confident that a fix was on the way. Ice Cream Sandwich promised to be a beautiful and slick upgrade. I eagerly waited for the next update.
And waited.
And waited.
And finally, I came across this post from Sony's official mobile blog. The phone would not be receiving the ICS update. As it would turn out, the phone would no longer receive any OS updates. Why they couldn't push to some 3.x version instead is beyond me. Perhaps it's unfair to say they lied about the phone's abilities to support ICS before the OS was even available for the phone, but it's also unfair to advertise such a thing as a selling point, and then stick the customers with a janky OS update that breaks more than it fixes. The customer loses, either way, unless they install one of the many custom OSes made by the development community, which are often more stable and offer more features with a smaller file size.
While I'm being accusatory, I'll bring up the other promised feature geared to sell this device: ported PlayStation games. The Play, along with its sibling the PlayStation Vita, was designed to be a successor to the PlayStation Portable. Both of these new devices were part of the PlayStation Suite, a software framework to distribute PlayStation content to certified devices. Bearing the XcrossMediaBar interface of the PSP, the Play would offer an impressive library of titles, including a plethora of ported games from the original Playstation. Any games stamped with the Playstation Certified mark would also work on the Playstation 3.
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| PlayStation Mobile |
What we got was much different, and much less. An app called PlayStation Pocket came with the phone, and PlayStation Certified games appeared here, along with any other "Xperia Play optimized" games. Opening it gave a horizontally tiled list of games and not much else. There was no ability to add any non-certified games to an otherwise vaguely convenient launcher. Besides Crash Bandicoot, which came with the phone, there were five additional PSX ports, and that's all the phone ever saw. The months ticked by, with no word on any newly ported titles coming. PlayStation Suite was rebranded PlayStation Mobile, and still customers waited. Finally, Sony announced that the classic titles would no longer be a part of any future PlayStation Mobile plans.
The Silver Lining
Unlike the ill-fated Nokia N-Gage and its ilk, the Xperia Play does competently perform its main purpose, running games. While game console emulators wobble along the gray line of legality, being removed from the app marketplaces one day, only to reappear under a different name the next, there is no denying that they go with this phone the way peanut butter goes with chocolate. As far as mobile retro gaming goes, the Play faces little real competition, especially against touchscreen-only phones. The physical buttons have the perfect blend of squish and click, and the analog touchpads work incredibly intuitively and well, especially in Minecraft: Pocket Edition. The phone is just powerful enough to run some Nintendo 64 games (including my beloved Bust-a-Move 2 and Perfect Dark), and thanks to Crash Bandicoot's PSX emulator being reverse-engineered, running ISOs of original Playstation games is a cinch.
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| CyanogenMod 9 |
A while back, Verizon finally threw their hands in the air and said "fuck it, do whatever you want with the damned thing". Owners could now unlock the bootloader of their Xperia Play, allowing them to install custom OSes such as CyanogenMod 9. This not only provides a stable OS, it frees up a ton of space, and in the case of CM9, finally brings the Android Jellybean experience to the phone. I have done this with mine, and I highly recommend it.
Conclusion
As a phone, the Xperia Play never stood a chance at turning heads. But as a mobile gaming platform, it could have been the kick in the ass that Android game development needed. Sadly, "could have been" is where the story ends. With underpowered hardware, unstable updates, lackluster software, and broken promises, this phone fell miles flat from its great potential.
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