Well, the leaks have been flying fast and furious: the presumed PlayStation Phone has been in the hands of folks for a hot minute, and now a video has popped up showing one lucky hombre playing Resident Evil 2 and Rage Racer on the device. The hardware is apparently on the up and up, although the fact that the titles had to be loaded through ROM Buddy suggests that the software is still being tinkered with. That said, it looks like this thing is pretty much a done deal. See for yourself after the break.
Sony Ericsson’s PlayStation Phone – aka the XPERIA Play – has popped up in the wild again, this time staging a family renunion of sorts with a variety of Sony PlayStation portables and Sony Ericsson handsets. Android.tgbus spent some time with the PlayStation Phone and even managed to get a third-party gaming emulator running on the Android smartphone.
They claim it was a “70-percent success”, which doesn’t really mean much; needless to say, Sony Ericsson will likely have locked down gaming options on the handset when it launches anyway, so that you’re forced to use their own ROMs rather than cracked or copied ones. As for the comparisons, the smartphone gets up close and personal with the PSP-1000, the PSP Go, DSi, GBA SP and other Sony Ericcson handsets.
The PlayStation Phone was last seen in the wild on Friday, complete with some preliminary benchmarking and a “PlayStation Pocket” app store, seemingly for games downloads. We’re expecting Sony Ericsson to officially launch it at Mobile World Congress next month.
Okay, now this is getting ridiculous. It’s been literally less than 48 hours since we saw the first in-depth Chinese-language preview of Sony’s still yet-to-be-confirmed PlayStation Phone, and believe it or not, we’ve got another one. (Our resident translator Richard Lai suggests this might be the same PS Phone just being passed around the various websites.) It’s just as long and arguably just as in-depth with an absolute ton of comparison pics with the PSP Go, the Xperia lineup, a DSi, a Droid… the list goes on. Much of what’s written is the same, and the PlayStation Pocket app is still a mystery. The preview does say a third-party emulator was downloaded and tested, with 70 percent success, but that doesn’t actually tell us anything. Anyway, even if you don’t know Chinese, hit up the source and bask in the glory of a ton more pics.
Well, that was quick. It was just two days ago when the elusive PlayStation Phone popped up on a Hong Kong forum, and now it’s back again in full exposure thanks to Chinese website IT168. It’s now confirmed that said Xperia-branded device is powered by a Qualcomm Adreno 205 GPU, along with what’s likely to be a 1GHz Snapdragon QSD8255 as featured on the HTC Desire HD. Interestingly, Neocore is reporting an impressive 59.1fps benchmark, which is a hugeimprovement from our exclusive look back in early December. Quadrant also reports a high score of 1,733, but hey, there’s no saying that this is the final build, so the graphics performance may get even better.
Other tidbits found in the latest leak include the generous battery capacity of 1,500mAh, the 854 x 480 resolution on a 4-inch LCD, a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash sans 720p video recording (although it’s probably just that the leaksters didn’t look in all the submenu in the camera app), 512MB RAM, 512MB ROM, a microSD slot, SIM slot, micro-USB, and a second mic on the back for active noise cancellation à la Nexus One. Interestingly, the still-empty game launcher app is now called “PlayStation Pocket.” We’re still unclear just what the app will run; will it be PSOne games (the company has written an emulator before), PSP games, or an entirely new lineup? (In contrast, the PSP Go has a 333MHz processor, 64MB RAM, and a 3.8-inch 480 x 272 display — albeit on different, not-quite-comparable architecture.) Hopefully we’ll know soon enough, eh Kaz? Anyhow, you can peruse some pictures and videos below, and definitely check out IT168 for the full skinny on this (somewhat tick) device.
Kaz Hirai, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, just twirled a fine dance around the PlayStation Phone. In discussing Sony’s future strategy for offering a coherent and extremely expansive consumer offering, he used the words “tablets,” “smartphones” and “PlayStation” in the same sentence, whetting appetites but never taking the leap to confirm what we all pretty much know his company is working on:
Strategy encompasses driving the development of a variety of new strategic products and services including tablets currently in development as well as smartphones, all the while of course integrating the knowhow and the assets that we’ve accumulated from our PlaySation business.
We’ve heard of the mysterious, still-totally-unofficial PlayStation Phone running Android 2.2 in the past, but we’d also heard it could run 3.0 — thing is, that was back before we knew Gingerbread would be 2.3, so it’s possible that those 3.0 rumors ended up materializing as 2.3. Capiche? Anyhow, this is the first time we’re seeing the Xperia Play (or Zeus Z1, or whatever it’ll end up being called) running 2.3 in the wild, doing its thing next to a white Xperia X10 to give you an idea of scale. The lucky poster actually has two of the phones available, so they seem to be leaking out of factories in sufficient quantities now to suggest that it’ll likely be announced soon — or so we hope, anyway. CES? MWC? We’ll know soon enough. Follow the break for the 2.3 evidence up close.
Also notable: these appear to be new hardware builds that feature refined touch surfaces — notice the engraved circles — along with PlayStation-themed and Xperia logos at the bottom (notice the telltale square, triangle, X, and circle shapes). The screen shots call out a model number of R800i, which has previously been associated with the Zeus… so this is definitely lining up nicely.
A few weeks back we a learned that Sony was going to be offering an official PlayStation app for Android users and for the iPhone. The app has many features, and none of them have to do with actually playing games. The app allows you to check the online status of your friends on the PlayStation Network and a lot more.
It has a full list of all games available on the PlayStation and the game list offers media and descriptions as well. Sony Europe first announced the app and noted it would land only in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and The Netherlands to start with. We now know that the app will come to more countries with version 1.1 including Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, and Poland.
There is still no mention of the US, but we can hope that 1.1 update will bring the app here too. Sony has also noted that it has plans to make a version of the app for the iPad as well. We all know that apps made for the iPhone on the iPad are not ideal.
Behold the best idea any road-safety authority ever thought of – PhoneGuard – blocks texting when a phone is traveling faster than 10mph. Get teased with a preview pic of the ASUS Eee Pads pre-CES. Take another leaky look at the upcoming Android Music App (video). See as AppsFire adds video previews for Android apps, possibly tipping this sort of functionality in the Android Marketplace soon. Take a peek at a tip from a Japanese newspaper calling spring 2011 as the release time for the eve elusive Sony PlayStation Phone. Marvel as your Android phone becomes the brain of a robot. All this and MORE on SlashGear Morning Wrap-Up!
