The PlayStation Phone

and my top-of-the-line phone has everything I could possibly want except for a square button and Crash Bandicoot oh F yes this is one of the most interesting elements of PlayStation history and it it barely even mattered in the grand scheme of things this is the Sony Xperia Play or it's just way easier to call it the Playstation phone because that's fundamentally what it is and for the longest time a Playstation phone was heavily rumored I remember ideas of like oh my God the next PSP is going to be a phone the next PSP is going to be a phone didn't help that in 2009 we got the PSP Go which would you look at that these are both shockingly similar they do have a couple of major differences but at the end of the day the Sony Xperia Play phone is uh very much like if you took a PSP Go and uh you just put like Android on it instead of the PSP's operating system well the whole slide mechanism was introduced on the PS P go I mean that was a big cell phone esque thing uh this phone right here I got for like $5 on eBay or something and it is in fact the first cell phone I owned which hey if this is $5 you must think oh well the Sony xeria play must be worth like hundreds no I mean it's more expensive than other obsolete smartphones but every Ebay listing I can find is well under $100 that's the thing if you want a cheap like camera or just like an emulation device or something for for sure go for an older smartphone yeah a lot of them may not work properly I mean we'll get into that this thing is a bit of a brick outside of the box but nobody wants a smartphone from like five plus years ago so hey there you go there's my fun fact of the day you can get like an iPhone 5 for like $20 it's one of the only things that has not risen in price obsolete smartphones and thank God the Sony xeria play is as cheap as it is because this is like one of the most obscure parts of PlayStation history yeah I think a lot of people know about this but barely anybody actually had one so why is that well this Smartphone released in 2001 this was right before like the iPhone 4S launched and I remember using the iPhone 4S uh my dad had one and that was the first iPhone in my family so I remember that and I also had an iPhone 4 that was my first iPhone so uh you know I generally know like hey what what the iPhones were working like back then and uh I got to say uh this is a pretty shitty phone this is a problem I see all the time with these gimmick smartphones they try to sell you on one thing in particular with this is the fact that you can slide it up and you have Playstation controls other than that as a phone it is so damn mediocre I mean I'll hand this to it for a 2011 smartphone it still runs pretty damn smoothly but design-wise it's not the hottest looker it is a pretty chunky smartphone for for 2011 now let's be fair it's definitely because of the slide mechanism so I won't dwell on that too much but you look at the specs of this and it is very midrange for 2011 it's not horrible but it's also for the price you're paying you kind of expect a little better performance I mean the camera on here it's not amazing but we don't give a damn about the specs of the phone we want to talk about the gaming elements you know this is a gamer's phone and that's something that's been pushed for a while I mean look back to the Nokia engage that was a dedicated game console mixed with a cell phone you know it was a real Trailblazer for the time it was also God awful the engage wasn't a very functional device I mean just the fact that you had to remove the battery from the back in order to change the game cards tells you all right there it was not a super wellth thought out device I mean even the screen orientation being vertical and most of the games that released for it rep reports of Game Boy advanced games so you have game like Sonic Advance running on the end gaau and it's unplayable you can't see where you're going the screen isn't wide enough it was impressive for sure I mean the original Tomb Raider from PlayStation 1 was ported to the end gaug and in the early 2000s that that was genuinely incredible but it made things pretty obvious that customers didn't want this half and half you know oh it's not a great phone it's not a great video game handheld but together it creates a pretty lame ass product that that that has some cool elements for sure but overall it it is very much a jack of all trades master of none little shocking that they didn't theme it around PlayStation more you know instead they opted to go for the Sony Ericson Experia branding I mean Sony is kind of willing to put the PlayStation brand in places that aren't necessarily PlayStation oriented I mean you have the PlayStation 3D display you have the PlayStation theater and then you have the Playstation phone that's not called the Playstation phone I mean mobile phone support just kind of felt like it was the obvious step for Sony to take with the PSP line I mean the PSP already felt like it was the do anything and everything device you can use it to browse the web watch movies play console quality games so adding a mobile phone to the PSP made sense and uh you know they kind of did with the introduction of the PlayStation VA they offered 3G support on this thing yeah exclusively through AT&T the only time I actively remember an audience booing Sony at E3 2011 but this was more so to allow you to play online multiplayer on the go or browse the web but I mean it just it felt like it just didn't make any sense why would you do that there's nothing that you really need to do that with on the PS Vita it's kind of nice to have it as an option but I don't really think the vaita took advantage of the 3G support whatsoever it kind of just felt like another thing to add to the line up of features and nothing more so obviously the answer wasn't adding a phone to the PlayStation Portable it was adding the PSP to the phone this launched a year before the V released uh and a couple months after the V was announced as the Next Generation portable the NGP and uh it felt like a bit more of like a lowkey just kind of test run product didn't really feel like Sony super believed in it kind of just let's see if this works I mean Sony is a company that does that where they're just they're just going to throw everything at the wall they don't give a damn so this launched in the spring of 2011 and uh in my research for talking about the Sony Xperia Play I found Message Board topics from people in the fall of 2011 saying that downloads aren't working anymore and the xeria play is pretty much uh dead so let me tell you my experience with this thing uh I haven't really actually turned it on and tried it out until very recently and you know what's a big problem with this device it only comes with 400 megab of storage on board that is pitiful it's not like this was a standard back then I mean the iPhone 4 launched at like what 16 GB to be fair you can't expand on the iPhone storage the entire reason why they skimped out on the storage of the Xperia Play is that you can put in a Micro SD card uh here's a big problem for me I'm a fuing idiot I'm going to be honest you can definitely laugh at me for for this uh I'm not going to completely fault the the Sony xeria play for this but uh you see this right here that is where your sim card goes and then right here is where the micro SD card goes uh don't put the micro SD card in the Sim slot because it's stuck in there I lost a 200 gigabyte micro SD card fitting in there I don't even know if a 200 Gig micro SD card would technically work on this thing it's probably a little too big for it like in terms of the tech specs like it might be way too much for the Sony experi rep play the handle but it was the only one that I knew of that I had on hand so uh I I put it in here but I realized I accidentally put it in the Sim slot because it's literally right next to the micro SD card slot it's not even right next to it it's not like oh wow I misread that no literally this is the SIM card slot and this is the micro SD card slot and like IED it up what the fu yeah so either way I don't think I can really put a SIM card in here anymore uh micro SD card is stuck in the Sim slot but uh thankfully I did find a 4 GB micro SD card I was able to put that in there but uh guess what it doesn't matter I'm connected to the internet everything's all good but like nothing really works still to the Experia plays credit uh there are a fair amount of games that come preloaded onto it however you do have to download some data uh the problem is whenever I try to do that it will give me an error message or or like the download just will never happen it's really unfortunate because there's some interesting games on here really brings me back to this era of mobile gaming uh you know I'm not going to act like this era had like the cream of the crop but I have a ton of nostalgia for this stuff even like okay it comes preloaded with the mobile version of FIFA 10 like that brings me back CU I would download anything that was free on the App Store or that was like a dollar I'd save up my money I'd buy like games like this or I'd buy the light version a lot of these games had a light version like FIFA 10 definitely did The Sims 3 I played that on mobile a fair amount uh doesn't work uh we have a game by Game Loft called Star Battalion this fighting game Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior you can go into this xeria play app and it'll show you all the games you have uh loaded up on here uh none of these work but this app is primarily for mobile games that have been optimized for the xeria play primarily meaning it uses the the controls down here and yeah for the most part they're pretty much the same as the PSP Go except instead of a standard analog stick in the middle here and starting select buttons here we have two uh touchpad things these are very strange it's kind of just a way for them to give you analog control but they aren't sticks this is another touch input so like I'll hand it to them like it does definitely solve the problem of oh using a touchscreen analog stick on the screen your thumbs are in the way it solves that problem uh but using a touchscreen analog stick still isn't very good we have this settings button here which oddly reminds me a lot of what you see on Modern controllers how we replace the start and select buttons with like share and options this looks like the options button and then we also have l&r buttons they're a little slanted so you know they kind of Point more downward compared to the PSP Go shoulder buttons so kind of makes this feel a little more Home console like I guess uh the super play does feel nice I just wish I could actually use the damn thing you know me can barely hack aing potato Scott wasak the thing is for everybody uh none of these games work on the xeria play anymore the big heavy hitter that's pre-loaded on this device is the original Crash Bandicoot so yeah the Xperia Play could play PlayStation 1 games in their entirety the problem is much like the other games on this device uh it requires a download or it needs an SD card and I was around back there a lot so it's probably not in there properly I don't really care because none of this was working anyways I do know there are some options when it comes to getting crash to work here you can find an update file online plug the xeria play into the PC drag and drop that update file onto the xeria play and it should work from there uh to be honest I I tried to get this work for 30 minutes and then I realize what the am I doing this is this is pointless especially when I can experience Tetris on the Experia play yes Tetris works and I think this is pretty cool because I remember this version of Tetris back in the day on my iPod touch and iPad and all of that like this was the tetris mobile game of my childhood and you know what's reallying weird it's pre-loaded on the xeria play it works in its entirety and it doesn't use the damn controls yeah this only works with the touchcreen and this only works in portrait mode when you actually flip out the Playstation controls it doesn't work uh it may pause the game but that's about it very strange inclusion I mean you know hey it's Tetris everybody loves Tetris and Tetris is like the perfect game to just have pre-loaded on your phone but it's so strange to me that they pre-loaded a version of Tetris that doesn't take advantage of the main gimmick of this video game Centric phone yeah so overall there's not really a ton I can do with the xeria play I can't even use the internet properly with it like it always just gives me error messages that doesn't mean it isn't still a damn cool device and people are able to get this thing working you can still put emulators and ROMs on it and uh that's what a lot of people did back in 2011 because this phone ran Android and Android is pretty emulator friendly so yeah this was the perfect phone for the on thee-o gamer the problem is like it this is such a niche market man don't get me wrong it's incredibly nice to have dedicated video game controls on your smartphone uh this day and age though I'm just going to tell you how I feel I don't need dedicated video game controls on my smartphone uh I can wait till I get home if I really want to play a video game with a controller or if I'm going to go somewhere and I know I'm going to have time to play a video game I'll just bring a dedicated portable honestly the idea of an all-in-one device is super enticing but then you start to realize what that means it's really cool that my smartphone can play all these video games the problem is this is my phone do I really want to drain the battery playing Mario 2 or do I want to save the battery because it's my smartphone and I want to be able to call or use it for GPS or anything like that if I need to instead you could hack a PSP and load that up with all the emulators and ROMs you could possibly want there's more of a Homebrew Community for the PSP anyway so you're going to have a lot easier of a Time troubleshooting things and getting things to work there's way more materials online showing you how to get emulators running on a PSP uh compared to uh getting sh figured out with the Sony xeria play and while this is a cool novelty and an obscure part of PlayStation history I feel like this is the more reliable better option if you want kind of like an emulator device these days but at the time in 2011 like I was saying yeah the idea of an all-in-one device is cool until you know you you run out of damn battery life and being an all-in-one device it wasn't necessarily great at anything yes you have dedicated PlayStation buttons that's awesome but uh yeah uh you're not playing actual PSP games on the xeria Play like look at that Xperia Play app it's literally just a bunch of mobile games that allow you to use uh a d-pad with them now they released some PlayStation 1 games and even then I'm kind of having a hard time finding any sources on like what Playstation One games released for this thing at least in North America I feel like more released outside of the US but in the states I think the only one that ever released was Crash Bandicoot so yeah the exper rep playay ended up being kind of just like a one shot little experiment just to kind of put PlayStation stuff on a Sony smartphone I mean Sony phones have never been the most popular so maybe they tried to do some cross promotion to just make it so then like hey maybe PlayStation fans will buy this smartphone or maybe smartphone fans would would get this and they'll be like oh damn well I need a PlayStation 3 now I don't know but in the end I feel like this was a pretty failed experiment uh judging by the fact that they never did this again nowadays I think the xeria play is still a perfectly reasonable emulation device and for the most part like actually just using it it holds up surprisingly well but you couldn't actually use this as an actual smartphone these days right now the only point of this is to use it as an emulator for that you know like hey this this was the best phone on the market at the time and honestly probably ever just because it came with dedicated game ad controls this is the smartphone dreams were made of I remember people talking about the idea of like a Nintendo made phone or or whatever and you know hey yeah it is pretty cool but uh when you actually get it in your hand you kind of realize like oh that's neat but the official support for the xeria play wasn't really there I don't really care about playing mobile games with a gam pad like yeah it's nicer to be able to play these games with a gam pad and a good handful of games did support the xeria play but at the end of the day they're still mobile games I don't really care about having dedicated PlayStation buttons to make it a more comfortable gaming experience because honestly I'm not looking for a great gaming experience I'm looking to kill time buddy but hey this is just me trying to give the perspective of like a general consumer because I think that undermines how neat that this thing even existed but it makes sense why it didn't do well I mean the smartphone itself isn't anything to write home about the GamePad is cool but barely any games actually utilized it and if you were just going to use this for emulators buddy you could already do that on a PSP Go so this just kind of felt like a PSP Go uh with a contract on Verizon did you ever realize how weird it is how the Xperia Play was a Verizon exclusive and the PlayStation vaita with 3G was AT&T just show Sony didn't give a damn you want to play The Muppets Movie Adventures on a device with 3G support you need AT&T you want to play Tetris on a device with a gam pad even though Tetris doesn't support the GamePad get Verizon this is such a little time capsule right here it really brings me back to this era of gaming where uh people were kind of wary on the future of dedicated portable game systems so uh Here Comes Sony trying to mess around with the idea of doing a smartphone uh that incorporates a PlayStation Gamepad and I will definitely admit the way they went about this is so much better than something like the end gaug but at the same time the I took last night was better than the end Gage but you know what the Experia play is cool enough where I would say it is leagues better than the I took last night but if it can't play The Muppets Movie Adventures it may be better than the I took last night but it's still kind of a piece of I mean back in 2011 it was probably a perfectly fine smartphone experience I remember watching some reviews of it back then and everybody had the kind of sentiment like it's okay but now it's like buddy nothing works voice search video games come on you're the video game phone the screen turned off

Channel: Scott's Stash

Views: 53,935

Keywords:

Id: T2aX7WDvTd4

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 04 2024