Why I think the world is ready for another Xperia Play

Some ideas that don’t work aren’t bad, they’re just early. Microsoft arrived at concepts for a tablet and smartphone early, but the company did it before the hardware and software were ready. It took advancements in mobile chip architecture and the widespread adoption of multi-touch interfaces to make the

iPad
the initial success that it was. I think the same case could be made with the “PlayStation Phone,” otherwise known as the Sony Xperia Play.

Sony Ericsson — the joint mobile brand that would get folded into Sony proper in 2013 — launched the Xperia Play in 2011, right around when the original handheld boom was starting to wind down and mobile gaming was at its peak. The PlayStation Vita was out and the Nintendo 3DS was introduced that March, but there was a certain logic to selling a smartphone with a

built-in controller
to help bridge the gap between two types of gaming. Now that Sony is reportedly exploring the idea of making a handheld console again, smartphones are more powerful than ever, and everyone is much more interested in handheld games, it stands to reason: the world might be ready for the Xperia Play now in a way it wasn’t before.

Making the “PlayStation Phone”

As it turns out, you combine some of the PSP Go and a Qualcomm chip

The Xperia Play was officially revealed on February 13, 2011, and was only available on Verizon to start. The phone had leaked before it was announced and, because of its design, was more than a little familiar once people actually saw what it looked like. From the front, the Play looks like a standard Android phone from the time, with a 4-inch, 854 x 480 pixel resolution LCD touchscreen, the normal Home, Back, Menu, and Search buttons, and Android Gingerbread running the show underneath. But when you slide the screen up to reveal a built-in controller, the Xperia Play looks familiar in another way: It’s basically a PSP Go.

On that slide-out controller, there were the PlayStation face buttons, a control pad, two touchpads that could take the role of physical sticks, shoulder buttons, and Start, Select, and Menu buttons. With the pre-installed Xperia Play and PlayStation Pocket apps, you can navigate a library of controller-compatible Android games in Sony’s XrossMediaBar interface, and play a collection of early PlayStation titles that were able to run directly on the phone. The idea at the time was that Sony could expand that library over time and developers could update their Android games to make more of them compatible with Play’s controller.

It was a solid idea, even if the Play became most popular as a way of using the variety of emulator apps available on Android. As a phone, it was more of a compromise, but not in a way that couldn’t be made great with a few tweaks. Leaked photos of a Xperia Play 2 made the rounds in 2020 even suggest Sony was considering a successor with a much sleeker design than the first version, but it never saw the light of day.

Handhelds are everywhere and Sony has experience

The Switch kicked off a new renaissance we’re still riding out

Sony / Pocket-lint

The current interest in handhelds is downstream from the massive success of the first Nintendo Switch in 2017, which made traditionally home console-style games portable in a way they previously hadn’t. The Switch launched with an aging (at the time) Nvidia Tegra X1 chip, but it was still one of the most powerful consoles Nintendo had ever offered. When it came out in 2022, the Steam Deck poured rocket fuel on the concept of a console-quality handheld by proving that the same thing was possible with PC games. Handheld PCs existed before the Steam Deck, but SteamOS (a version of Linux) and the Proton-compatibility layer made the vast majority of PC games compatible on the handheld too. That, paired with the general move to bring most console-exclusive games to PC at some point, means that handheld PCs have suddenly become a one-stop shop for every kind of game you could want to play.

Dedicated handhelds survived until 202 in the case of the Nintendo 3DS and 2DS and 2019 in the case of Sony’s PlayStation Vita. Following the retirement of the Vita, Sony went four years before releasing anything resembling a handheld console, and its first device back was the PlayStation Portal, a Frankenstein fusion of display and DualSense controller that’s meant to stream games from the cloud or your local PS5.

All that being said, Sony has plenty of experience building hardware, and handhelds in particular, so there’s no reason the company couldn’t make something good again. That’s why it makes sense that Bloomberg reported in November 2024 that Sony is developing a handheld console that can play PS5 games. The advancements in smartphone hardware over the last few years make the idea of the device being a bit more like a Xperia Play more reasonable than it might seem.

Smartphones are more powerful than ever

Increasingly, most computers look a bit like a smartphone on the inside

Apple

Mobile chips are now sold on their ability to match the performance and features of devices you can get out of desktop computers. Both Apple and Qualcomm have touted the ability to offer ray tracing in-game graphics as a reason you should use their chips. In fact, one of the ways Apple tried to illustrate the power of the A18 Pro in the

iPhone 16 Pro
was by showing that it can run modern games like

Assassin’s Creed Mirage
. In so many ways, mobile chips and the Arm architecture they use have won.

The mix of power and efficiency is so compelling that even laptops use what are essentially suped-up mobile chips. Macs use M-series chips, which are based on the custom silicon Apple uses in the iPhone (for example, the M4 chip used in new Macs and iPads is based on the A18 Pro from the iPhone). Microsoft and many of its partners making Copilot+ PCs use the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus or Elite for nearly all the same reasons Apple chose its chips. It might not be possible to run a PS5 game at the quality of a PS5 with these chips, but they can definitely let you run it on a smaller, more energy-efficient device than you could normally. The more pertinent limits would be battery life or storage, not necessarily power.

For all those reasons, a device like the Xperia Play seems like an entirely possible option for Sony to pursue. And if it also doubled as a smartphone or a tablet, given the screen size the company would probably want to use, it could fit the luxury product space Sony likes to occupy. It’s easier to justify paying for a smartphone or a tablet than a dedicated console.

There’s no reason the next PSP couldn’t be a weird phone

Stranger things have certainly happened

If you look at the rising cost of the PS5 itself, it’s clear that Sony is not particularly interested in offering anyone a deal. In terms of the simplest experience the company could offer that it could still charge the highest price for, a handheld PC makes more sense than a smartphone or a tablet.

Still, the PlayStation Portal runs Android and Sony is still releasing smartphones. There’s a world where a spiritual sequel to the Xperia Play could happen, and I think it might be the world we’re living in right now. While we wait for Sony to make its next move, there are gaming phones you can buy right now, like the Asus ROG Phone 9. Mobile gaming has its disadvantages, but it really seems like a lot of them could be overcome with the right hardware and software, something Sony is more than capable of providing.