Sony Xperia Play Review

I've been wanting to review the Sony Xperia play for a while now. I have to say this phone has held up nicely. I haven't had any cracking of the screen, but I did have a couple of crashes and malfunctions. Some of the positives of this phone is the built in controller. 

If you slide the phone, it has an official Sony Playstation controller. This by far is the best thing about this phone. It makes playing games from the app store so easy. There are two trigger buttons just like a real controller. I had a blast trying out games on the app store.

The weight of the Xperia Play is too heavy in my opinion. It weighs 6.17 oz, and the standard cellphone is about 4.7 oz. I definitely noticed the difference from my last phone. The Xperia is heavy because of the full controller built into the back of the device.

 

The speakers are decent on the Xperia play, but it's nothing to be excited about. I had a hard time hearing YouTube videos, even when the volume was all the way up. Maybe I'm going deaf, but I wasn't impressed with the sound. 

Taking pitcures is not bad they are in 720p, so don't expect great quality. The front-facing camera isn't that great. It's only a 1 mega-pixel camera on the front, so expect some grainy video chats.

The system memory is only 512 MB, so after a couple of apps, the phone will slow down considerably. I was really hoping that Sony put more space in this phone. I guess the system memory was overlooked when making the specs. The plus side is you can have a micro SD card up to 32 GB. This should be more than enough to house all your apps and movies. 

Where do I begin with battery life? Well, it's not bad, but don't expect it to last a full 24 hours. I can almost make my phone last that long, but I have to dim the brightness all the way down. I turn off the GPS, because it wastes the battery. The Wi-Fi gets turned off as well, when I'm not using it. After you do all these things, then it will almost last you the entire day. 

I like the image quality on this phone. It has a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels, with a 245 ppi (pixel per inch). I sometimes have problems with the phone recognizing tapping, but it's not often that happens. 

My biggest downside of this phone is it's laggy. The 1 GHZ Snapdragon processor, it's just not enough to run the OS smoothly. I often find when I'm browsing the web, the webpages are slow to load. Zooming and scrolling are a pain, and I often need to delete apps to gain a little speed. 

Overall, the Sony Xperia Play is a nice day-to-day phone. It can handle basic tasks, but if you're looking for heavy use look elsewhere. The built in controller makes gaming on the go easier. If I had to rate this product, I would give the Sony Xperia Play a 7 out of 10.