With this morning’s announcement of the PlayStation Suite and Android users set for PlayStation-quality gaming, you would expect Sony to go ahead and officially confirm the Xperia Play. 
The long-rumoured handset however still remains unofficial.
Despite this Engadget has gone and posted an in depth hands-on preview of the handset. It looks to set to be one helluva phone, combining a 4-inch multitouch, 854 x 480 display with a slide-out control pad.
As we all know by now, the slide-out section features a D-pad, the four PlayStation buttons and what looks to be a touch sensitive pad in lieu of those familiar analogue sticks.
The phone also packs a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 processor and an Adreno 205 GPU. Adding to this already potent mix is 512MB of RAM, something that will definitely prove useful in more intensive gaming activities. We are still yet to see any PSP games in action, however with this kind of power under the hood it seems pretty likely that the Xperia Play will easily manage the PlayStation-quality games announced earlier today. 
Software-wise the phone appears to have improved on many of the shortcomings of the older X10. It comes complete with all the Android Gingerbread goodies, including mobile hotspot capability and then adds in a few special Sony extras.
Gone is the resource-hogging Mediascape app, replaced by individual applications for each of Mediascape’s functions. There is also a new home screen feature which allows you to bring all widgets on screen at once by pinching anywhere.
The iOS-style horizontal icon menus remain with a quick sort feature added in. There is now also a quick release function for icons which allows you to rearrange them in a similar fashion to the iPhone.
As said earlier any actual PSP gaming is yet to take place. Engadget however did manage to get some emulators running and map controls to the Xperia Play’s D-pad. The video can be seen here. 
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