The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play: Where Do You Want To Take Your Gaming Today?

A few months back, I attended Qualcomm's Uplinq conference in San Diego, where among other things I met AnandTech's Brian Klug for the first time. Sony Ericsson Mobile Communication's Rikko Sakaguchi, the company's Executive Vice President and "Chief Creation Officer", delivered one of the conference keynotes. Within his pitch, Sakaguchi emphasized that his company's aspiration was to not be another 'me-too' smartphone manufacturer but to instead deliver unique products with tangible value to target customers.

I strongly resonate with that corporate goal, with the qualifier that I've also heard it plenty of times before from other companies, and that repeated past-history case studies suggest that it's 'easy to say, but hard to do'. And I also assume (and hope) that Sony Ericsson did at least a modicum of market research before rolling out the Xperia Play. But some amount of doubt admittedly begins to creep into my consciousness when I think back to Sakaguchi showcasing the Xperia Play as a 'no compromises' platform in his pitch...and compare his claim against my hands-on findings during this evaluation.

As such, after spending a week-plus with the Xperia Play, I'm admittedly skeptical of its chances. Granted, standalone handheld game consoles aren't doing a stellar job of holding off the gaming-on-mobile phone onslaught. The very day I finished the first draft of this writeup, for example, Nintendo slashed the U.S. price of the latest-generation 3DS from $250 to $170, in conjunction with announcing a quarterly operating loss. And Sony was atypically aggressive with the pricing on the upcoming PlayStation Vita ($249 for the Wi-Fi-only model, $299 for a 3G cellular data-inclusive variant), which the company unveiled at the early-June E3 Conference.

But I'm not sure that a gaming-tailored cellphone is the solution. Hard-core gamers will still buy and tote around a dedicated gaming console (or few), in addition to a generic cell phone. Casual gamers will stick with a mainstream cellular handheld, unwilling to accept the incremental price, weight and thickness of the Xperia Play (especially when, for the increased heft of a 'slider' design, they only get game controls on the lower layer, versus a more versatile-function physical keyboard). Is there a sufficient-sized middle ground between those two user extremes to cultivate a fiscally profitable customer base for Sony Ericsson? Maybe, but early market-embrace indications suggest otherwise.

I'm admittedly not a hard-core gamer. I am, on the other hand, beyond the other end of the spectrum; someone who occasional indulges in nothing more challenging than a bit of Angry Birds while waiting in line at the grocery store or gas pump. I own both iOS- and Android-based handsets, along with an iPod touch, a first-generation iPad and several Android tablets, all loaded up with an assortment of game titles...not to mention two jailbroken Sony Playstation Portables, both a Nintendo DS and a 3DS, and an assortment of living room gaming consoles. I'm arguably smack-dab in the middle of the Xperia Play target demographic.

So would I buy the 'PlayStation Phone'? Honestly, probably not. Generic titles for Android and iOS are less expensive than their Xperia Play-optimized counterparts, not to mention more numerous; the developers are making less money per sale but in exchange have access to a much larger potential sales audience. And many of the broad-base Android and iOS titles are at least as engaging as their Xperia Play counterparts, some of which I've already played on other Sony hardware and therefore wouldn't buy again, if not more. Heck, I've even tried a few homebrew PSP games that are the equal of their Xperia Play counterparts in overall entertainment value. The Xperia Play delivers a decent gaming experience, but it makes too many hardware tradeoffs (weight, thickness, etc) and its content is too expensive and limited in variety to justify its presence in my particular gaming stable.