Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play advertise: gross human thumbs stitched onto robots, drugged clubgoers, not much more we can say

Is this the creepiest ad ever produced to introduce a new video game console? That's a high bar to pass -- but is it the creepiest ad for a new smartphone? Perhaps. The minute-long spot for Sony Ericsson's upcoming Xperia Play called "The Donor" appears to explain the backstory behind its last ad, relaying the tale of a young gentleman who was clubbing with friends, met an attractive woman, took her home, and woke up the next morning to discover that his thumbs were stone cold gone (notice the dirty, poorly-bandaged stumps on the table as he tells his tale of woe to a local law enforcement official). Cut to the next scene, where we've got our cute, lovable Android bot waddling around town... oh, and he's got human thumbs crudely sewn onto his arms. Go ahead, recoil in horror, vomit in the trashcan next to your desk, then cue the inevitable increased desire in owning this phone. Follow the break for the video, if you dare. 

Havok physics engine coming to Android 2.3, demoed on Xperia Play

Great graphics are often a component of great video games, but fancy physics can help too, and last week Havok announced that it was bringing those to Android, along with all of the requisite development tools. That means smartphones with Android 2.3 or up can potentially enjoy the same procedural animations and pretty dresses that we've enjoyed on PC and home console for years, and as the first gamer-centric smartphone with Gingerbread on board, Sony Ericsson's forthcoming Xperia Play got to be the first to demo them. Watch a pickup plow through road hazards, a gorilla get catapulted across a football field, and an Assassin's Creed-esque warrior run, jump and climb with the best of them in the video above. Oh, and just so you know, we got a (very brief) hands-on with all three demos in person at GDC 2011 last week, and each was practically enjoyable enough to be an Android game of its own. The realistically bouncing ball's in your court, developers. Don't let us down.

Sony Ericsson wooing developers ahead of Xperia Play launch

Sony Ericsson is doing its best to attract developers who can create games tailor-made for its upcoming Xperia Play smartphone, working with third-party tool makers to simplify the development process.

The Android 2.3-based Xperia Play comes with a 4-inch touchscreen and slide-out PlayStation controls, including four navigation buttons to the left and “X,” square, circle and triangle buttons to the right. In the middle, the smartphone has a touch pad.

“It is probably the best gaming phone available on the market … but the content will be key, as with any other smartphone, and in this case content is the games,” said Francisco Jeronimo, research manager for European Mobile Devices at IDC.

To get games, Sony Ericsson will have to attract game developers, large and small. This week, the company is attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to show off the Xperia Play.

To make life easier for developers, Sony Ericsson is working with third-party tool developers. On Tuesday, Havoc announced that the company has optimized its developer tools for the smartphone. Also on Tuesday, Unity announced it has started shipping an Android version of its developer tool, which comes with integrated support for the Xperia Play.

Bogdan Iliesiu from Angry Mob Games detailed the work that went into optimizing its Guerilla Bob game for the Xperia Play, in a post on Sony Ericsson’s developer blog on Monday. The work included adding support for its physical buttons and touch pad, navigation for the game menus, on-screen control tutorials and optimizing the graphics.

The porting was done using Unity, and took about one week, Iliesiu said via e-mail.

From a developer point of view, Sony Ericsson is doing a great job on the Xperia Play so far, according to Iliesiu. The hard part will be to educate users, so they don’t expect all the premium games will be free or cost around 99 cents, he said.

To help secure tailored games for the Xperia Play, Sony Ericsson has also partnered with a number of larger gaming studios. Electronic Arts is developing The Sims 3 and FIFA 10 for the smartphone. GLU Mobile and Activision are adding Guitar Hero, while titles from Gameloft will include Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell.

Also, the Xperia Play is the first PlayStation Certified phone, which means users will be able to play some games from the first PlayStation.

More than 50 gaming titles will be available when the Xperia Play launches. The phone will start shipping in March, according to Sony Ericsson.

Xperia Play going back to the FCC, this time with GSM

We're all familiar with this handset by now, but what we weren't suspecting (although we have yet to finish our first cup of coffee) to see a GSM version of the Xperia Play come through the FCC this sunny Tuesday morning. While we know that Verizon won't be the sole carrier of the phone in the states (we heard that from Sony Ericsson CTO Jan Uddenfeldt himself), there is yet to be another carrier confirmed. So maybe this is an indication of another possible future? Or, most likely, this is just one of those "north of the border" jobs -- as you know, the FCC gets its look at all Canada-bound phones, and this particular phone is exclusive to Rogers. Get a closer look after the break.

Update: Further examination of the docs reveal that this bad boy has global GSM bands and 900 / 2100MHz 3G, which is primarily used in Europe and Asia.

Sony Ericsson detailing Xperia Play development: buttons easy, touchpad just a little trickier

In a post on Sony Ericsson's Developer Blog coinciding with the official launch of the Xperia Play at MWC earlier this month, the company clued in developers on how to take advantage of the game-specific controls they'll be dealing with on that glorious slide-out board. In short, it's insanely straight forward for the most part: the hard buttons just generate standard key codes, which explains why existing games worked so well with the unit we'd previewed. The only tricky part comes into play with the center-mounted touchpad, which can't be accessed through the standard Android SDK -- for that, you'll need to turn over to the NDK, the native-code escape hatch that Android devs use when they need higher performance and want to get closer to the hardware. SE's published a 16-page guide on getting to the touchpad through the NDK, and it seems straightforward enough -- and plenty of game developers are well acquainted with the NDK already, anyway -- so we're guessing it won't be much of a hurdle. Getting devs to support an input method that's only available initially on a single commercial device might be a bigger hurdle... but we digress.

Optimus 3D & Xperia Play On Pre-Order In the UK For Over £500

This is just one of those early, unsubsidized, let’s-not-freak-out-yet prices, but still. £520 works out to nearly 850 of our anemic US “dollars.” What does Sony-Ericsson think this Play thing is, the PSP 2?

And the Optimus 3D — it’s certainly a beast of a phone, but with the 3D effect not blowing us away and the market for that kind of thing rather limited, I’m not sure it’s going to move a lot of units without an 80% carrier subsidy. Hey, it happens.

The prices come from Play.com, and should be taken with a grain of salt. We’ll probably hear some soothing, corrective words from S-E and LG over the next week.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Play due for Verizon, we go hands-on, just for fun

Sony Ericsson as promised tonight unveiled the Xperia Play. The Android 2.3 flagship is the first to support PlayStation Suite and is designed to not only run PS1 and original games with PSP-style controls but to run them well. A 1GHz Snapdragon with an Adreno 205 graphics core runs many games at the full 854x480 resolution at 60 frames per second.

The phone will come preloaded with multiple games, in many cases including Bruce Lee, FIFA 10, Asphalt 6 and others. Some titles will have full multiplayer support to hop online either with 3G or Wi-Fi. EA, Gameloft and others have already signed onboard. A dedicated PlayStation app, PlayStation Pocket, will aggregate games optimized for the controls, although these won't have to go through a PlayStation-specific store.

As a handset, the Xperia Play revolves around a four-inch, 480x854 screen and has a five-megapixel camera for photos. Android 2.3 here has Sony Ericsson's new-for-2011 Timescape UI including rare design touches such as a pinch-to-zoom on the home screen to see all widgets and support for iPhone-style home screen app folders.

Sony Ericsson is promising a very quick launch for the phone and will ship it to many areas in March. In a rarity, the Xperia Play is coming to the US first and will be available through Verizon in early spring. Prices and other details haven't been given out, although a custom PlayStation Suite store isn't yet ready and will come later this year; Android Market will be used for now.

We tried the phone at Sony Ericsson's event in Barcelona tonight and came back fairly impressed with its odds of taking on the iPhone as the de facto gaming phone. While the graphics weren't any different than a current iPhone's in terms of visual detail -- though they looked good -- they ran as smoothly as promised, which is imperative for gaming. Many of the games loaded reasonably quickly as well, although they sometimes too a bit longer than expected. We'd also like clearer visual cues in some games that you can move to the next screen.

The physical controls are mixed but positive. Regular buttons, such as the D-pad, front facing buttons and the shoulder buttons, have a wonderfully tactile feel. They press quickly but feel well-built and give a steady grip. The two optical trackpads, however, we're not so sure about. From what we could try of them, the precision seemed fairly coarse. In FIFA, for example, it tended to result in all-or-nothing movement rather than fine-grained steps. We'd need to try games where precision is more important to confirm this.

The games themselves behave much as you'd expect for modern mobile 3D games more than they do PlayStation titles, but that's not a bad thing. The physical controls definitely help for action titles by taking your hands off the screen so you can focus on the full field of play. We had the most fun with Bruce Lee, since it would be difficult to have a true fighting game on an all-touch device like the iPhone and the game mechanics themselves are well-executed. Asphalt feels too much like a direct port, though, and other than needing to press a button for the gas, there's not much different.

As a phone, it's very much like the Xperia Arc, which is mostly good. Timescape has been cleaned up significantly in 2011, and much of it is much more responsive and less gimmick-oriented. We most liked the folders, which were overdue for Android and a needed catch-up to the iPhone. Pinching on the home screen is helpful as well, though it bogs down very heavily; we suspect it's either unoptimized even a month before launch or just too much to ask for the 1GHz processor.

Our main misgiving is just that the phone is designed around an experience from late 2010 hardware. With many Android phones and even the iPhone likely to go dual-core, the visual detail and even just what kinds of games are possible could be limited. Also, we don't know the full extent of developer support in the long run. As a subset of Android, the Xperia Play can only court so many game developers. It will need widescale adoption to work, and right now many teams still skew towards the iPhone.

Still, as a first effort at a true, modern gaming phone, the Xperia Play shows lots of promise. If you wish you could spend more than just 20 minutes with a game at a stretch, it's probably a better pick, at least in the short term.