Sony Ericsson Xperia Play confirmed for O2 network

No sooner is the PlayStation phone officially revealed than the first UK network confirms it'll be offering the hotly anticipated gaming blower. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play will come to O2 sometime this year.

O2 revealed the news with a tweet on its official Twitter feed, exclaiming, "Awesome news -- the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play is coming to O2." The tweet is light on detail but does link to the disconcerting Super Bowl advert involving Android getting an unusual back-room operation.

O2 hasn't used the word "exclusive", so now O2 has got in first we're sure other networks will be keen to confirm they'll be coming out to Play too.

We'll get official confirmation of the phone's specs at Son Eric's Mobile World Congress press conference this Sunday, but leaks suggest the Xperia Play packs a 4-inch, 854x480-pixel screen and a 1GHz processor with 512MB of RAM. It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and will be all set for retro-gaming thrills with PSOne games from Sony's new PlayStation Suite service.

The Xperia Play faces competition from within its own family, as the Sony NGP handheld is also arriving this year. Click here to see what you thought of the NGP, and whether it can Play nice with the Xperia.

We won't know when the Xperia Play will arrive on these shores until Sunday, but you'll be first to know thanks to Crave's crack team of phone news commandos, bringing you up to the minute news and reviews from Mobile World Congress.