This will likely go down as one of the greats of all-time worst kept secrets. Sony Ericsson has officially unveiled their Playstation phone, ie the Xperia Play.

You'll probably have read of its specs and features before when it was leaked, but here's a recall of those details. The gaming Android smartphone will be released with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, running on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor with Qualcomm Adreno 205 graphics. It will boast a decent 4-inch, 854 x 480 multi-touch LCD screen, the combination of which Sony says will provide 60 frames per second playback and manage up to 5 hours, 35 minutes of battery life in a single game session with the slide-out PlayStation Certified controller.

As you can see in the image above, the Xperia Play has a similar setup to the PSP2. Instead of analog sticks, the Play uses a touch pad, but it does have a D-Pad, action buttons and shoulder keys (L/R triggers).

Of course, let's not forget that the Xperia Play is still a phone, it'll be either a quad-band GSM or CDMA and EV-DO smartphone. Other multimedia features include a five-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, you can no doubt expect stereo speakers, bluetooth and WiFi, as well as Sony Ericsson's Timescape overlaying UI.

The phone comes preloaded with a "legendary" PSone game of the undisclosed variety, as well as a bevy of popular Android games including Asphalt 6, The Sims 3 and Tetris, and Sony Ericsson promises a library of 50 additional titles available at launch from 20 publishing partners. Some games ported from existing smartphone platforms (like Reckless Racing) will have bonus content on Xperia Play, too. Local area multiplayer gaming is a go, as you'll be able to host a WiFi hotspot on one device and join the game with another.

As you can imagine, Sony have plenty of influence in the gaming market and they've secured some big-name games for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. Those games include Battlefield, Dead Space, Guitar Hero, Assassin's Creed, Galaxy on Fire 2 and Dungeon Defender: Wave Two and more. You'll need to be aware though, the games have been reworked to use the dedicated game controls on the Xperia Play. But we suspect, the hacking community will soon find ways to sort ouf the problem and enable many current PS3 games to run on it. But for now, it will remain as an exclusive club, FIFA for example will have a multiplayer mode exclusively for the XPERIA play.
Check out the video below…

Launching in March, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play will be available on Verizon in the US exclusively this Spring, while there are suggestions currently that we'll be seeing its European launch later in March before it hits the States.

[via Engadget, GSM Arena]