Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play preview: First look

Great music player

The music player interface on the XPERIA Play is very similar to the music section of the discarded Mediascape app. The interface is laid out in four tabs for the available sorting options: all artists, all tracks, playlists and albums.

The music player UI

The Now Playing screen offers all the standard music controls, shortcuts to the library and the Infinite key, which lets you quickly look up a song or album on YouTube or Sony Ericsson’s own Play Now arena.

The only available visualization is the album art.

Now playing menus • YouTube link • Equalizer presets

The XPERIA Play has a rich selection of equalizer presets.

Good 5 megapixel snapper

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play has a 5 megapixel camera, complete with a single LED flash. It produces images of 2592х1944 resolution and offers image stabilization and geotagging (thanks to the built-in GPS receiver). It’s supposed to have touch focus as well, but our prototype seems to lack that feature.

There’s no dedicated shutter key on the XPERIA Play – the space is used up by the trigger keys and – disappointing enough – none of them can be used as a shutter key. Some other gaming controls work in camera mode though. The X button serves as a shutter key and the O button is a back key. The menu key brings up the relevant options.

The main set of options is limited to focusing mode, exposure, scene mode, color effect and picture size. ISO, for example isn’t among the available user-configurable options.

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play camera UI

In terms of picture quality, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play does well even at this pre-release stage. Images have a good level of detail, with pleasing colors and reasonably low levels of noise.

No HD video recording

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play does WVGA video at 30 fps. In any other device in this segment this would’ve been a disappointment but the XPERIA Play is in a different line of business.

The video camera UI

The resolution aside, the XPERIA Play videos are smooth enough, with good colors.The video camera interface repeats the still camera.

Here’s a video sample taken straight from the phone.

Web browser supports Flash

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play browser is right there on top with the best of them. It is the latest version, due to the 2.3.2 software, and supports Flash to give you the downsized, but full web-browsing experience.

The user interface is minimalist. Once the page loads, all you see is the URL bar and the bookmark button at the top of the screen. Once you zoom in and pan around though even that disappears (scroll to the top or press menu to bring it back).

Android web browser on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play

Web pages take full advantage of the high-resolution 4-inch display of the XPERIA Play. There are three supported zooming options – double tap, pinch-to-zoom and the virtual “- +” buttons at the bottom right.

Browser options

The minimalist UI is quite powerful – hit the menu key and six keys pop up. You can open a new tab, switch tabs, refresh the page, go forward, and open bookmarks. The last button reveals even more options (text copying, find on page, etc.).