Emulation on the Sony Experia Play!

This video shows emulation working on the Sony Xperia Play. Enjoy! :thumbs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty4UjDHn-S4

I think this will sell the Xperia Play to quite a few retro fans. :)

Nice. Looks pretty good. I'm sure plenty of people fill find it tempting to buy that product.

Yet another device.

Yes, but this is different because it is an Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) smartphone, so is completely up to date with the market, and combined with the official Sony PSP control system and PSP marketplace, it has some weight behind it for current gen mobile gaming. For anyone looking to get a new mobile (or if your contract is coming up for renewal) it is a great choice, with the bonus of good controls for gaming and emulation support.

The only negative point about this phone is that the Samsung Galaxy S II is being released in May, and that is much thinner, has a better 8MP camera, and has a better larger brighter touch screen. Both are however running Gingerbread so there is no difference there, and I actually prefer Sony's customization of the OS on their current phones compared to Samsung's. I think if you just want the best Android mobile then the Samsung is going to be the one to get, but for gamers the Sony is going to be the winner. But for me I just don't know yet. I think I might wait until the Samsung is out to compare the 2.

Just a little update. I finally got a Sony Xperia Play recently and have been really enjoying it.

It is an unlocked and sim free one so not locked into any network, which means it doesn't have any restrictions. We had loads of trouble trying to update the OS in my wife's Samsung Galaxy S as it would never be recognised properly when connected to the Kies software on the PC and I've still not managed to update it. I thought the same was going to occur with the Xperia Play because I plugged it into the PC via USB and it installed the PC Companion software perfectly from its installer held on the phone, and I could access the phone and perform all the functions the software offered, but on it stating an OS update was available I tried to perform this, and the software made me switch connection mode on the phone, at which point the software could no longer install a USB driver that worked and it couldn't update. However Sony have added OTA (Over the Air) updating directly with in the OS, so I did this and the phone downloaded and updated itself. Much nicer solution, so now it is running Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread.

The newer version of Android had added a lot of updates that make it much nicer to use than even 2.1 was, which I have experience from the Galaxy S. You can now move installed Apps to the SD card to free up space on the phone's internal storage, but also you can use the Android SDK on your PC to change a setting to tell all Apps to installed to the SD card so you are no longer as limited to what you can install at any one time. Much better. You do still need to keep a few of the Apps in the phone storage if you wish to use Widgets with them on the home screens, or if you want them updating.

And even though the Play has a 1GHz CPU, so similar into speed to the original Galaxy S, it seems much smoother and faster to use. I've had no slowdown at all yet and everything opens very quickly and loads fast. Very nice. I've also been impressed with the speed of the browser with sites like the BBC homepage loading in seconds.

Also I was surprised by how easy it was to obtain the Android App Installer Packages (APKs), manually put them on the phone and install them. Android even comes with a dedicated package installer built in now so no need for a third party one. Same for moving Apps to SD card as the functionality is there in the OS as standard, although I do still use the App "App to SD" as it is faster. You can even download APKs directly though the phone's browser and then install them (great for emulators as most are no longer directly hosted in the Market, but instead on developer's own sites). So easy and so nice. It is now the best mobile platform I've ever used. So open and giving freedom to do exactly what you wish. Complete contrast to iOS or Blackberry where you are locked down and not allowed to do much yourself at all. You don't even need to go to the Android Market to get Apps if you really don't want to, but contrary to loads of people's out dated comments about Android, the Market Place has tons of Apps. Maybe not as many as the Apple App Store, but that has been around a lot longer, so that is a given. The quality of Apps is definitely more polished these days too, with loads of free ones.

As for the Xperia Play's unique features. It's Play optimised games are very nice and was have so far been impressed with the graphics quality and framerate, the audio is clear and loud with a fair amount of base for such a small system. Also the dedicated controller is brilliant and much nicer than using the touchscreen. And for emulation it is great as all the emulators I've tried so far have allowed remapping to the controller's keys. N64, SNES, Genesis, Amiga, MAME etc all emulating and playing very nicely.

The only downside of the Play specific games is how large they are. The actual game installers are similar in size to larger Apps, taking up around 3-12MB when installed, so not an issue, but when you launch any Play game for the first time it then has to download the actual game files which so far have ranged from 30MB for the smallest game, to over 600MB for the largest. With the largest this can take some time to download all that data. At least it stores all these on the SD card.

I will do more in depth review of Android emulation as I get chance to try more of them.

Also worth mentioning is Rom Buddy. An App (no longer found in the Marketplace, but available elsewhere) which connects you directly to a rom download site. You can use the App to navigate through rom collections for all popular systems (including Amiga) and directly download roms to the phone's SD card. It even automatically sets up a Rom directory with Sub directories for each system for the files to download into. Very nice.