Sony Ericsson Xperia Play to be announced soon

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play has been pretty widely leaked for some time now, but now it's "almost official" with a full announcement coming on Sunday just prior to the big Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.

Basically, the hardware is a standard Android slider that replaces the QWERTY keyboard with some Playstation style gaming buttons. We don't know the exact spec of the handset, but we'd guess that it has at least a 1GHz processor and something like an 852 x 480 pixel display (it's hard to be sure from the only official photo we have).

The software is a different matter, Sony have already given a commitment to mobile gaming so expect some cool additions here. Also, we suspect that to get the best out the Xperia Play then games will need to be adapted to use the controls. It will be much easier to play certain games this way though as a standard Android handset really only has the touchscreen and accelerometer which makes some genres frustrating.

We'll know the the full score in a few days, hopefully including information about the launch date.

[Via]