Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (Verizon Wireless)

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play looks a lot like a regular Android smartphone at first glance. It has a great 4-inch display, and is clad in a glossy piano-black finish.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play ships with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, the latest Android OS. The interface is quite vanilla; there aren't any manufacturer or carrier skins interfering with the experience.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play has a rear 5-megapixel camera and a front-facing VGA camera.

On the side edge of the Xperia Play are the left and right shoulder buttons, plus a volume rocker.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (Verizon Wireless)

Editors' rating: 3.5 out of 5

The good: The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play ships with Android 2.3 Gingerbread without a complicated overlay. It has a slide-out game pad that makes gameplay more immersive, and it comes preloaded with popular game titles like Crash Bandicoot and Asphalt 6. Features include a 5-megapixel camera plus a front-facing camera, Wi-Fi, and GPS.

The bad: The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play's touch-screen gaming controls are not as responsive and precise as we would like, photo quality is average at best, and it lacks an HDMI port and 4G LTE.

The bottom line: The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play is a significant step forward in mobile gaming, but it suffers from key hardware limitations.

Read CNET's full review
Prices start at $199.99

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play is slightly bulkier than the average phone, at around 6.17 ounces.

The slide-out game pad on the Xperia Play reveals a D-pad and face buttons that look like the controls on Sony's Dualshock PlayStation controller. Instead of two analog joysticks, however, the Xperia Play has two touch-sensitive circles.

The Xperia Play comes with seven preloaded games, six of which are playable with the physical game controls. An app provides access to featured Xperia Play games that are available from the V Cast App store. You can play games from the Android Market that are designed for the Xperia Play, too.