While games have been available on mobile phones since the early days of monochrome displays and simple, yet highly addictive, titles such as Snake, mobile phone gaming as seen a dramatic revolution in recent years. This is largely due to the rising popularity of smartphones with touchscreen displays, with the App Store and Android Market providing perfect means for amateur and not-so-amateur game developers to put their ideas out to the general public.With the increasing popularity of games on mobile phones, and with the increasing amount of processing power available to smartphones, the traditional big names of the console world have been keen converge their smartphone and console gaming divisions. Towards the end of 2010 Microsoft introduced Xbox LIVE support on all of its Windows Phone 7 handsets, taking the mobile phone gaming world to a whole new level and now just a few months on, Microsoft's traditional console rival Sony is about to do the same.Sony has had hand h eld consoles for a long time now and so the move to push this functionality into smartphones was perhaps inevitable. The Xperia Play could be thought of as the love child of the PSP and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 as while it offers a fantastic hand held gaming experience it still offers the same high degree of smartphone functionality found in the Japanese-Swedish partnership's trusty range of Android handsets.On first glance the Play looks like any other Sony Ericsson Xperia phone. When you slide out the rear you expect to find a QWERTY keyboard as you would on most sliding phones, but instead you are greeted with a Sony control pad. This includes the directional pad, start button and the iconic square, cross, circle and triangle and makes the Play automatically the most suitable phone for gaming, especially for people who are already highly familiar with Sony's consoles.It would be a bit tricky to try and compose SMS messages containing only squares and triangles so cons umers can be rest assured that additional functionality is provided via a fully touch sensitive screen. The 4" LED backlit LCD display offers just the right level of quality and roominess to make it ideal for a phone heavily intent on gaming, while still retaining an ideal size in terms of portability.It is highly likely that Sony Ericsson will introduce many more PlayStation phones in the near future, with the Xperia Play 2 almost certain to come with a dual core processor. So, while there are many games currently on offer for the Xperia Play you can expect many more titles to released as time goes by ensuring that you will never run out of ways to have fun with this smartphone.While being primarily targeted towards gamers the Xperia Play still comes with a great set of messaging, social networking, web browsing and camera features to equal those that you would find on many of today's top smartphone. The only real competition to the Xperia Play in the world of mobile phone gaming is Microsoft's Xbox LIVE enabled Windows Phone 7 handsets but, arguably, the Xperia Play comes with the benefit of a superior operating system in the form of Google Android Gingerbread which for many people may prove to be a deal breaker.
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