It might've been 12 years later, but I eventually still got my dream phone 💖 Thanks to Aura for sponsoring this video, go to aura.com/dammitjeff and see if your personal information has been compromised 👀
@DammitJeff can you post a link to that Discord group you mentioned? I’m trying to find it but I guess it’s only posted in redit and like always it’s trying to force me to use their app… NOPE! Not sure why they make people try to use their app to the point of me hating them!
A lot of people forget that Minecraft mobile for iOS and Android (known as Minecraft pocket edition at the time) was exclusively launched on the Xperia Play. Notch was at e3 2011 showing off the game in the Sony/Ericson booth.
I used to absolutely love this phone - this was a lovely trip down memory lane. I remember at the time using ePSXe instead of Sony's own emulator to play PS1 games, i remember that input delay being a real nuisance.
Psx4droid, epsxe and the other one I forget the name was good. Reicast and n64oid were the other great emus for it, shame I did t know about drastic that would solved many issues for me
Sony made such good devices that never took off or they just dropped. Xperia phones were my favorite at around this time. They just felt premium back when Samsung was all plastic.
I remember there was a feature in psnapp that let you play from your sony phone then with a modded version you could do it on any android phone but then it was patched to keep the feature for sonyphones because no one was buying them. never met anyone with a sonyphone or anyone who even knew this feature existed, maybe shooting themselves in foot repeatedly didnt help.
If Sony or Samsung came out with a sliding gaming phone with modern sleek 3DS like controls and second screen. I think it could really take off. What a machine
This was my first phone, and all these years I still have it, now in a box as an electronic relic. This device was my first exposure to Crash Bandicoot because "woah a cartoon animal character" (my game shuts down after Ripper Roo for some reason, so I can't access the rest of the game without the 100% password). I had no idea you could just mod it for further functionality after the catalog shutdown. Thanks for some shinning light on my old boy!
Freshy10 I got my second iPhone back then, the games on Xperia was bad, that store. Symbian OS on it, too weird ! Kept using the iPhones, never a Sony Phone after that.
This was such a nostalgia trip. This was my first phone and in a short period of time the Flex broke and I couldn't get it fixed. I cried for hours. Thanks for this video chief!
This was my dream phone too, I wanted it so bad I looked everywhere. Sadly I was never able to get it and had to settle for an Xperia Mini Pro, which, in hindsight, wasn't bad at all because it turned out to have the exact same internal specs! That physical keyboard, while not exactly a controller interface, performed well enough for that purpose. So it may not have been what I wanted, but unbeknownst to me, it was the next best thing in the Android sphere at the time.
INCREDIBLE VIDEO!!!! always been one of my dream devices to own one day, thank you for summing up a lot of the cool stuff you could do with it!!! can't wait for more shenanigans on the channel! 💖
Missed the Sony Ericsson days when they gave us cool Sony stuff added to their phones such as the Cyber-shot and Walkman phones. You might haven't heard of Ericsson, but Ericsson is a telecommunications company based in Sweden and it used to make phones. After a fire happened to Ericsson's supplier of chips, Ericsson decided to partner with Sony, who also make phones too but not that popular outside Japan. Thus, they formed a joined venture company called Sony Ericsson but later in 2011, Ericsson sold its shares of Sony Ericsson to Sony so it became just Sony Mobile.
All of my phones in high school and college were Sony Ericsson. Z20, S700, K750, W705, W710, W595, J20 etc. Even my first Smartphone was Sony Xperia U. Not a very good phone.but it looked awesome with it's lights at the bottom.
For mobile gaming, I’m very happy with my Switch. I like a dedicated gaming device which gets the latest full games and not “mobile versions.” Great video bro.
It really depends on the use case, personally i find it a hassle, with the psp go, i could just put my phone in my pocket, psp in the other, and go, anytime i got bored it was just there, with the switch, its this whole ritual of putting it the case, and then lugging it around or having to put that inside a bag-pack.
@@mactep1 The psp sizes were actually perfect for portability. Shame that outside of emulation devices we don't get systems with that form factor anymore.
what the hell? dude, the switch is so underpowered and barely gets games... if you were talking about a steamdeck or rog ally or smth id understand, but what...
@@StarmenRock I know what you mean Bro. Actually I’m not playing graphically intensive games like Hogwarts Legacy or Witcher 3 on my Switch. I use it for games which suit handheld play better - like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Dredge, Cult of the Lambs, and other such games that I wouldn’t play on a big screen on my Xbox or PS. I never even used to give these games a chance, but now I do on Switch.
i had a psp go in my later years in high school and absolutely fell in love with this form factor, pretty god size screen for retro games, while being so compact that i could just bring it anywhere, as a secondary device, without any hassle or having to bring a bag or carrying case for it, sadly it seems to have died with these devices :(
Having a controller mounted on your controller must have been a big deal back in 2011. It really looks cool, even if it takes inspiration from the PSP Go. One thing: The sign-in "bug" isn't actually a bug: Google ended support for Google services on Android 1 and Android 2 a few years ago.
Mobile gaming back then was perfect! We had games fun enough to play for little sessions of gaming and some powerful enough to make spend a good amount of time, but nothing too much focus demanding like console AAA games.
I bought one of these a few years ago, and it has the perfect form factor and screen size for emulating Gameboy and GBA. For anything more demanding than that, you probably want something with a bigger screen and more power for upscaling. The difference having good physical controls makes vs just having a touchscreen cannot be understated though. The buttons/controls on this thing still feel premium to this day.
I had this phone throughout middle school - high school. I remember already being heavily into psp modding when I got this and had custom psx roms loaded into the phone's built in emulator 💀 Crazy good times having that thing in my pocket and hiding the slide out part from teachers was clutch.
This video was a big nostalgia kick for me. I didn't have an Xperia Play, but i did have a Kyocera Rise. Very smilar form factor and performance level but instead of psp controls it had a qwerty keyboard. I played all these games. Especially GBA and SNES emulators with my slide uo keyboard bound to button presses. For N64 games I'd connect my wii remote over Bluetooth and plug a wii classic controller in.
@@cosmic_Iatte Well you are wrong to think that, unless you like unnaturally fat characters and making platformers unplayable if they require any sort of precise jumping at all. It might be okay in racing games, but even then I'd just prefer to zoom in instead.
I had one of these, loved it! Apart from the hinge got so wobbly and loose after a short while. Wish they'd make a modern day one. Loved playing all the games you demo'd on it!
Thank you for making this video! I still have and use mine! I actually own 5 Xperia Plays! One was DOA from an eBay purchase however my first one was purchased when it first came out! I mainly used it for tethering my unlimited 3G Verizon internet connection! I’m shocked how you have so much installed!! I could only install less than a handful of APK’s due to the extremely limited on board memory :(
@@Blindperson38 nah, it was many years ago that I had unlimited data plan with Verizon. They had removed unlimited accounts (guessing it was due to AT$T getting away with it!) . When I went to cancel my account, the employees were trying to find a way to switch my account over to one of them since no one could get it anymore! This was before LTE was wide spread.
Nokia N-Gage QD and Sony Xperia Play were true mobile gaming, also special mention to Razer Phone for starting the "gaming" smartphone revolution (ASUS ROG Phone series and Nubia Red Magic series).
PS5ProROGPhoneROGAllyuser I was on Xperia Sony Erikson PS too then, Symbian OS games, T-Mobile, mad ! N-Gage too Happy with the non gaming iPhone i bought too ! Rest was never used for games....
This nerd in my class had an ngage in 2006, i convinced my mother to get me one on sale. The nerd in my class set my phone up and it had unlimited free internet in 2006. I could download any album i wanted from soulseek and he put emulators on it and I could be in class downloading roms and using msn for free.
7:58 I go with the original aspect ratio because I hate seeing characters, backgrounds, and hud elements stretched due to it heavily messing with the pixel art.
I have this phone. it's sitting in my drawer with the rest of my old phones. I remember 64 emulation was just getting started when I had. Didn't know you could play paper Mario on it now and DS might dig it out test out some of the new stuff
It would have been amazing if sony stuck to this, imagine if they made a modern version with snapdragon 8 gen 3 they could port any ps4 game they wanted
Most phones came with a file browser at first, there was a time where that was excluded and i was put off buying new phones for a while. But all android phones can install .apk files just fine
I had one of those 11 years ago. I remember It had a 32 GB SD Card that was set as swap and extra internal storage, It had its bootloader unlocked (it was a very sketchy process that required joining 2 pins behind the battery) and a custom ROM. The highest this phone ran was ICS 4.0.4 and it had to be a custom ROM from community devs. Some managed to get Jellybean 4.1.2 on it, but it was not a good experience. The real problem with the phone is the fact that it had only 512 MB of RAM. It had a good GPU and CPU, but the lack of RAM made it very disappointing for gaming. However, I had a ton of fun with it. I really miss it.
I've wanted a modern powerful version of this phone for so long now. I hope eventually the d-pad gets its rightful place as a digital navigation tool in our cyborg lifestyle
Imagine how cool it would be to have a ps5 phone in a similar style to this with fold out controls, it could even have its own store you could buy ps5 games made for the phone itself
A lot has definitely changed. I went from Gameboy advanced to having a switch… but with time, I finally got a steam deck and THAT is my favorite mobile console of all time.
I’d think it would be cool if a new one of those came out. But it’d have to be as powerful as current iPhones to be able to play the games I’d want to play like Grid Autosport and Warzone Mobile. If it can do that and has solid gaming controls that slide out when you want to use them, in addition to a traditional touchscreen, I’d love it.
I would love if there was a ps5 phone in a slimmer design similar to this with slide out controls it could even have a PlayStation 5 store where you could buy ps5 games designed for the phone itself that would be amazing
@@therunawaykid6523 While that would be very cool, we probably won’t have anything like that anytime soon. But at least just a Sony Xperia Play 2 that can play those more powerful iOS and Android games, some of which are ported down from home consoles.
My first smart phone. I remember getting it after playing with it during Minecon 2011. There was a small kiosk for the phone to play the pocket edition of Minecraft at that time.
I wanted one as soon as i heard about it on engadget in 2010 and went to the phone shop at tesco in Northampton on its release week in about april 2011. I was living on a boat and my gaming life at that time was a nokia ngage and a psp, i didn't actually get one until 2012 and was very impressed with having vice city and gta3 on my phone. The analogues were crap though and i spent more time emulating 8bit and 16bit consoles with it. I could do that on ngage but the display was vertical so not optimal. I was also gaming on a nokia 9500 communicator at the time so Xperia play was a massive upgrade. I still soent more time on ds and PSP overall and mainly used xperia play for videos and tv etc. Being on a boat meant ps3/xbox 360 was not possible so i was a portable gamer for 10yrs nearly. Anyway thanks for the awesome nostalgia hit
I remember a classmate of mine owned this phone. Smartphones were kinda new at that time so personally i prefered the old phones over smart phones. I remember i got an iphone as a gift from my parents, all my other friends still had old non smart phones. I didnt like the swap from non smart to smart phone so i went back to using my old phone.
One thing that frustrated me to know was that Android didn't support XInput controllers until 2013. If the Xperia Play only had XInput support, any game that you can hook a gamepad into would have used the Xperia Play's built-in controls.
@@banguseater Thanks, that was probably what I was thinking about. What I meant was that games had to be hardcoded to work with Xperia Play's controls, but if there were an Android-level support for controllers at that time, they would have made it so the Xperia Play's controls get recognized as a regular controller, greatly expanding compatible games. Sure, the Xperia Play would have needed an L2 and R2, and L3/R3 could have been emulated by tapping one side of the touchpad.
Had this phone as a teenager, wish I was more interested in the nitty gritty of tech at the time so I could have taken more advantage of the device! I did get the g2 play a while ago with the add on accessories and emulation was a dream on it!
Dead space late at night on my iPod touch 3g that I had jailbroken and modded to the teeth is peak mobile experience and while I’m sad we will never go back. I’m happy I was there to have it
Bro having a jailbroken iphone or ipod back then was just some sci fi magic. Cydia was insane back then. Once you could no longer jailbreak iphones and they doubled the price I switched to android.
I had one of these and the battery life was shocking. I bought a Chinese XL battery that stuck out the back like a brick, it added about 30 mins. I completed RE2 on it and loved it, if the battery was better it would have been amazing.
Bought mine back in 2012 and I thought it was the COOLEST handheld thing to ever release, and I did a LOT of emulation on that thing, mostly for GBA and SNES. I also played thousands of hours of Minecraft on there! Man the possibilities! I honestly think that the Xperia Play is what really sparked the future of handheld gaming and especially handheld emulator hardware. Without it, I imagine everything handheld like this we know now would be a few years further out, or would be less commonplace. I still have my Xperia Play, even though I haven't used it in a few years, and I plan on keeping it for nostalgia.
When it comes to GB, GBC, and GBA games, I always played with the legit aspect ratio. Just can't stand to play it any other way. I really wanted one of these things back in the day and, I still want one. Sony really needs to revisit this concept. I would buy one in a heartbeat if they made a new one.
Loved the video. Just a little bit of info, Sony Ericsson was a collaboration between Sony and Ericsson, Ericsson are one of the pioneers in mobile telecom and are still around today, Sony eventually purchased Ericssons share in Sony Ericsson and renamed it to Sony Mobile.
jakeDOT. Sony needed Ericson, to release phones, patents etc. Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, they needed a telephone company all back then, MS bought Nokia etc.
"Sony's mobile division" - Ericsson. The Erik in question is Erik Eriksson, the father of Lars Magnus Ericsson, the founder of the Swedish business most commonly referred to as "Ericsson". So indeed, okay!
when used with a custom rom to degoogle it, allow overclocking and using the FPse emulator, it runs games much more smoothly than before. I recommend that to every xperia play owner.
God there was some phone with a push up keyboard that could play assassins creed and resident evil, this is like a superior version of that phone. Wish i knew about this back in the day!
I had two and I liked it, but for retro I had issues with input lag. Also, opening and closing overtime would bring issues with the flat cable. Lastly, internal storage was really bad. But it's already nostalgic to see it running.
The nostalgia in this video is just hitting hard. I remember how much I used to mess around with new phones and tablets. Learned many things from that and now in the field of computer science, all those things are still helping me out. My first GBA emulator was John GBA, then switched to myBoy cause it had Multiplayer over Bluetooth and Wifi. Life was simple 🥲👌
Its so unreal how far mobile gaming has gotten. Gotten worse that is. The fact that 2011 midrange hardware could run games with this great graphics is wild. But I guess everyone saw much money those terrible pay 2 win slop games were making and by 2013 totally went away with that model.
Awesome video. I picked up one of these as new old stock last year, since it was such a unique phone and I'm an old tech hoarder, I mean collector. Man, this is going to make me hunt down a older micro sd card and waste some time with retroarch again.
25 днів тому
I like the vibes you give bro and for that I have subscribed to your channel 🎉
Someone should REALLY consider making a big comeback of this kind of tech in their phones. Sure, it would make a phone little bit thicker. But we got now some pretty thin foldables and it doesn't bother anyone, right?
Got this when it came out on Verizon , had it for 6months before it got stolen I was only in the 6th grade very thankful for my hardworking parents the phone was so kick ass for Minecraft at the time
You know I am still using ES File Explorer till right now my phone is Nubia Z60 Ultra android 14, it is the best file explorer ever made, till this day it's working fine on my phone. The feature by ES File Explorer I love, hiding files, apps backups, LAN file transfer, zip extractor, file to zip, text editor, and many more. No other file explorer has all these features.
I would have loved to have this phone back in 2011-2014. But ever since Android phones became more powerful over the years and that we've been getting a lot of retro gaming handhelds (some running on Android and I have two Nvidia Shield Portables and one GDP XD+ but I currently use my Galaxy S22 Ultra with gaming controllers), the Xperia Play seems to be more of a antique novelty to look back in the past on what gaming phones could have been. But it would be nice to have to play older Android games that don't support gamepads other than the Xperia Play's controls.
Yeah this is like the classic looks really cool but not as feature packed and powerful as you want it to be , would love to see a modern version of this with a slimmer form factor and more power though
I had a friend who also had a PS Phone back in senior high, i could've sworn that the model she had was able to run Tekken 6 smoothly. Then the memory came back to me as the video went on, it did actually lag a little.
Oh boy, if they make full phone in xperia play 2... With best in class cameras, not worse what you can get in same year samsung. Psp/playstation feeling room. Doesn matter how much it would cost, i would buy it. But the point is to have sexy looking elegant phone that slides up like original xperia play and has everything top tier phones has... Cameras, 2k screen, with all bells and whistles...
It wasn’t ahead of its time; it was made logically. It’s not the first of its kind; Nokia did something similar, but the execution was poor for the N-Gage. As for this one, Sony didn’t want to create something that could compete with other Sony products, which is why they dropped it. They have a patent for it, so other manufacturers cannot copy it. That’s why they made it. There’s no other phone on the market similar to it because of this. So, when you use a phrase like ‘ahead of its time’, remember that patents expire after 14 to 20 years. This is why when you see many old videos of things you now take for granted and call them ‘ahead of their time’, it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s because of their patents.
Man me and my friends had this phone, we played a lot of games together, great for emulators, good times! oh dude! modding pocket edition too, the memories are flooding back lol
man, I almost pulled a huge credit to get that phone back in the day, it was seriously expensive where I lived, good thing they denied me that much money, I got a galaxy ace and that was good enough for me
there was a time . the grass was greener, not cleaner and everyone was smiling and not every 2nd person had an iPhone smartphone on this long-suffering...
I got one. It was tough getting a file browser onto it, but then it became my favorite carry around emulation device. That is really saying something, as I used to collect handhelds. PSP, Vita, V90, Ambernic 351MP, RGB30, DS, 3DS, GPD XD, Odin Lite, Switch Lite, OneXplayer. I only ever carried around the Xperia Play. When did you get yours? Enjoy while you can. That internal slide up and down display cable is going to snap in 3...2...1...Good luck trying to find a replacement.
Yeah I had one too but sold it soon after as I didn’t like that it didn’t have much on board space but the main reason I sold it was it was such a chunky phone and carrying it around in my pocket each day it felt so heavy so I got the much slimmer and lighter Samsung galaxy s2 instead - yeah that is one of the problems with a device like this that uses the slide out slide in feature all the time wear an tear
i had (still keep it) the xperia mini pro sk17i wich had the same internal hardware and played soo many games on it... mostly emulators, i used to configure the keyboard to play and it worked really well for me. sadly it got obsolete and i had to buy another phone after 5 years of enjoyment. i miss the keyboard and the small form factor.
It might've been 12 years later, but I eventually still got my dream phone 💖
Thanks to Aura for sponsoring this video, go to aura.com/dammitjeff and see if your personal information
has been compromised 👀
@DammitJeff can you post a link to that Discord group you mentioned? I’m trying to find it but I guess it’s only posted in redit and like always it’s trying to force me to use their app… NOPE! Not sure why they make people try to use their app to the point of me hating them!
@@Fr0stM00nit’s in the video description
@@jameschen8 thanks! I had not clicked on “more” 😅
no
Hey are you gonna make a video about the mig switch?
A lot of people forget that Minecraft mobile for iOS and Android (known as Minecraft pocket edition at the time) was exclusively launched on the Xperia Play. Notch was at e3 2011 showing off the game in the Sony/Ericson booth.
The very first demo was exclusive to this phone!
This just reminded me I had the most 🔥 survival world on mine. It’s a shame that I lost it
Watch the vid bro
I used to play this game on this phone 😂
I used to absolutely love this phone - this was a lovely trip down memory lane. I remember at the time using ePSXe instead of Sony's own emulator to play PS1 games, i remember that input delay being a real nuisance.
Psx4droid, epsxe and the other one I forget the name was good. Reicast and n64oid were the other great emus for it, shame I did t know about drastic that would solved many issues for me
FPSe!
Sony made such good devices that never took off or they just dropped. Xperia phones were my favorite at around this time. They just felt premium back when Samsung was all plastic.
The Vita was another device with amazing potential that they just dropped. What a shame
Back then apple didn't have a clue what it was doing (quite similar to now only they're following the others now)
I remember there was a feature in psnapp that let you play from your sony phone then with a modded version you could do it on any android phone but then it was patched to keep the feature for sonyphones because no one was buying them.
never met anyone with a sonyphone or anyone who even knew this feature existed, maybe shooting themselves in foot repeatedly didnt help.
@@chunkybeats79lol did you just say that apple didn’t know what they’re doing ? 🤣 sorry if i understood that wrong, my English isn’t the best 🙈
@@chunkybeats79lmao
If Sony or Samsung came out with a sliding gaming phone with modern sleek 3DS like controls and second screen. I think it could really take off. What a machine
This was my first phone, and all these years I still have it, now in a box as an electronic relic. This device was my first exposure to Crash Bandicoot because "woah a cartoon animal character" (my game shuts down after Ripper Roo for some reason, so I can't access the rest of the game without the 100% password). I had no idea you could just mod it for further functionality after the catalog shutdown. Thanks for some shinning light on my old boy!
Freshy10
I got my second iPhone back then, the games on Xperia was bad, that store. Symbian OS on it, too weird !
Kept using the iPhones, never a Sony Phone after that.
This was such a nostalgia trip. This was my first phone and in a short period of time the Flex broke and I couldn't get it fixed. I cried for hours. Thanks for this video chief!
This was my dream phone too, I wanted it so bad I looked everywhere. Sadly I was never able to get it and had to settle for an Xperia Mini Pro, which, in hindsight, wasn't bad at all because it turned out to have the exact same internal specs! That physical keyboard, while not exactly a controller interface, performed well enough for that purpose. So it may not have been what I wanted, but unbeknownst to me, it was the next best thing in the Android sphere at the time.
Shit man im ex xperia mini pro owner too that thing are such comfortable to use the physical keyboard are beast
@@tehonlynoobs5556 Agreed, it was a lovely device.
INCREDIBLE VIDEO!!!! always been one of my dream devices to own one day, thank you for summing up a lot of the cool stuff you could do with it!!! can't wait for more shenanigans on the channel! 💖
Missed the Sony Ericsson days when they gave us cool Sony stuff added to their phones such as the Cyber-shot and Walkman phones. You might haven't heard of Ericsson, but Ericsson is a telecommunications company based in Sweden and it used to make phones. After a fire happened to Ericsson's supplier of chips, Ericsson decided to partner with Sony, who also make phones too but not that popular outside Japan. Thus, they formed a joined venture company called Sony Ericsson but later in 2011, Ericsson sold its shares of Sony Ericsson to Sony so it became just Sony Mobile.
All of my phones in high school and college were Sony Ericsson. Z20, S700, K750, W705, W710, W595, J20 etc. Even my first Smartphone was Sony Xperia U. Not a very good phone.but it looked awesome with it's lights at the bottom.
That has to be the best sponsor segue I've ever seen, kept me genuinely interested
And it got interrupted by an ad
For mobile gaming, I’m very happy with my Switch. I like a dedicated gaming device which gets the latest full games and not “mobile versions.” Great video bro.
It really depends on the use case, personally i find it a hassle, with the psp go, i could just put my phone in my pocket, psp in the other, and go, anytime i got bored it was just there, with the switch, its this whole ritual of putting it the case, and then lugging it around or having to put that inside a bag-pack.
@@mactep1 The psp sizes were actually perfect for portability. Shame that outside of emulation devices we don't get systems with that form factor anymore.
I really thought this was sarcasm
what the hell? dude, the switch is so underpowered and barely gets games... if you were talking about a steamdeck or rog ally or smth id understand, but what...
@@StarmenRock I know what you mean Bro. Actually I’m not playing graphically intensive games like Hogwarts Legacy or Witcher 3 on my Switch. I use it for games which suit handheld play better - like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Dredge, Cult of the Lambs, and other such games that I wouldn’t play on a big screen on my Xbox or PS. I never even used to give these games a chance, but now I do on Switch.
i had a psp go in my later years in high school and absolutely fell in love with this form factor, pretty god size screen for retro games, while being so compact that i could just bring it anywhere, as a secondary device, without any hassle or having to bring a bag or carrying case for it, sadly it seems to have died with these devices :(
check out the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro
12:45 dude this part is super nostalgic. Like no one ever thought how much the game would change and how big it would become.
A red magic 8 with a slide in controller with all the things a modern controller has would be nice.
Having a controller mounted on your controller must have been a big deal back in 2011. It really looks cool, even if it takes inspiration from the PSP Go.
One thing: The sign-in "bug" isn't actually a bug: Google ended support for Google services on Android 1 and Android 2 a few years ago.
Phones back then looked more futuristic than today's phones.
Mobile gaming back then was perfect! We had games fun enough to play for little sessions of gaming and some powerful enough to make spend a good amount of time, but nothing too much focus demanding like console AAA games.
Sony could make the xperia play 2 and revive its phone line, but noooo lets do a streaming controller for the price of switch
Yeah they sure make some weird choices
I bought one of these a few years ago, and it has the perfect form factor and screen size for emulating Gameboy and GBA. For anything more demanding than that, you probably want something with a bigger screen and more power for upscaling. The difference having good physical controls makes vs just having a touchscreen cannot be understated though. The buttons/controls on this thing still feel premium to this day.
I had this phone throughout middle school - high school. I remember already being heavily into psp modding when I got this and had custom psx roms loaded into the phone's built in emulator 💀 Crazy good times having that thing in my pocket and hiding the slide out part from teachers was clutch.
This video was a big nostalgia kick for me. I didn't have an Xperia Play, but i did have a Kyocera Rise. Very smilar form factor and performance level but instead of psp controls it had a qwerty keyboard. I played all these games. Especially GBA and SNES emulators with my slide uo keyboard bound to button presses. For N64 games I'd connect my wii remote over Bluetooth and plug a wii classic controller in.
glad to see jeff make it so big istg im so happy with content he keeps putting i wish you always continue to make great
Original aspect ratio. People who stretch the image are psychopaths
I just hate the massive borders
@@cosmic_Iatte Well you are wrong to think that, unless you like unnaturally fat characters and making platformers unplayable if they require any sort of precise jumping at all. It might be okay in racing games, but even then I'd just prefer to zoom in instead.
some games could use the widescreen hack
The best thing is to play Mega Drive with Widescreen Hack.
@cheetah672 And you have ΟCD
I had one of these, loved it! Apart from the hinge got so wobbly and loose after a short while. Wish they'd make a modern day one.
Loved playing all the games you demo'd on it!
Thank you for making this video! I still have and use mine! I actually own 5 Xperia Plays! One was DOA from an eBay purchase however my first one was purchased when it first came out! I mainly used it for tethering my unlimited 3G Verizon internet connection! I’m shocked how you have so much installed!! I could only install less than a handful of APK’s due to the extremely limited on board memory :(
Verizon still works on 3G connections?
@@Blindperson38 nah, it was many years ago that I had unlimited data plan with Verizon. They had removed unlimited accounts (guessing it was due to AT$T getting away with it!) . When I went to cancel my account, the employees were trying to find a way to switch my account over to one of them since no one could get it anymore! This was before LTE was wide spread.
It is so cool to think playstation was the first to make a gaming phone
Man this brings me back! This was my first touchscreen, I spent hundreds of hours playing the Zenonia franchise.
Nokia N-Gage QD and Sony Xperia Play were true mobile gaming, also special mention to Razer Phone for starting the "gaming" smartphone revolution (ASUS ROG Phone series and Nubia Red Magic series).
PS5ProROGPhoneROGAllyuser
I was on Xperia Sony Erikson PS too then, Symbian OS games, T-Mobile, mad !
N-Gage too
Happy with the non gaming iPhone i bought too ! Rest was never used for games....
This nerd in my class had an ngage in 2006, i convinced my mother to get me one on sale. The nerd in my class set my phone up and it had unlimited free internet in 2006. I could download any album i wanted from soulseek and he put emulators on it and I could be in class downloading roms and using msn for free.
7:58 I go with the original aspect ratio because I hate seeing characters, backgrounds, and hud elements stretched due to it heavily messing with the pixel art.
I have this phone. it's sitting in my drawer with the rest of my old phones. I remember 64 emulation was just getting started when I had. Didn't know you could play paper Mario on it now and DS might dig it out test out some of the new stuff
junkimyt
Me too, i almost never used it, iPhone was way better !
Symbian phones, was crab !
Labelling the Minecraft chapter "hello old friend" brought a tear to my eye. Old pocket edition made so many childhoods.
It would have been amazing if sony stuck to this, imagine if they made a modern version with snapdragon 8 gen 3 they could port any ps4 game they wanted
I would love a modern version of this phone in a slimmer form factor and more power
Most phones came with a file browser at first, there was a time where that was excluded and i was put off buying new phones for a while. But all android phones can install .apk files just fine
I had one of those 11 years ago. I remember It had a 32 GB SD Card that was set as swap and extra internal storage, It had its bootloader unlocked (it was a very sketchy process that required joining 2 pins behind the battery) and a custom ROM. The highest this phone ran was ICS 4.0.4 and it had to be a custom ROM from community devs. Some managed to get Jellybean 4.1.2 on it, but it was not a good experience.
The real problem with the phone is the fact that it had only 512 MB of RAM. It had a good GPU and CPU, but the lack of RAM made it very disappointing for gaming.
However, I had a ton of fun with it. I really miss it.
You scared the hell out of me, in point 1 sec I closed my browser I thought someone hacked my pc and added that audio in 3:22
The great thing is all of these games and those android games were full gaming experiences without any microtransactions.
I've wanted a modern powerful version of this phone for so long now. I hope eventually the d-pad gets its rightful place as a digital navigation tool in our cyborg lifestyle
Imagine how cool it would be to have a ps5 phone in a similar style to this with fold out controls, it could even have its own store you could buy ps5 games made for the phone itself
check out GPD Win Mini....it might exactly be what you want. its not a phone though.
A lot has definitely changed.
I went from Gameboy advanced to having a switch… but with time, I finally got a steam deck and THAT is my favorite mobile console of all time.
This video inspired me to buy an Xperia Play for myself. Dammit, Jeff!
I’d think it would be cool if a new one of those came out. But it’d have to be as powerful as current iPhones to be able to play the games I’d want to play like Grid Autosport and Warzone Mobile. If it can do that and has solid gaming controls that slide out when you want to use them, in addition to a traditional touchscreen, I’d love it.
I would love if there was a ps5 phone in a slimmer design similar to this with slide out controls it could even have a PlayStation 5 store where you could buy ps5 games designed for the phone itself that would be amazing
@@therunawaykid6523 While that would be very cool, we probably won’t have anything like that anytime soon. But at least just a Sony Xperia Play 2 that can play those more powerful iOS and Android games, some of which are ported down from home consoles.
My first smart phone. I remember getting it after playing with it during Minecon 2011. There was a small kiosk for the phone to play the pocket edition of Minecraft at that time.
I wanted one as soon as i heard about it on engadget in 2010 and went to the phone shop at tesco in Northampton on its release week in about april 2011. I was living on a boat and my gaming life at that time was a nokia ngage and a psp, i didn't actually get one until 2012 and was very impressed with having vice city and gta3 on my phone. The analogues were crap though and i spent more time emulating 8bit and 16bit consoles with it. I could do that on ngage but the display was vertical so not optimal. I was also gaming on a nokia 9500 communicator at the time so Xperia play was a massive upgrade. I still soent more time on ds and PSP overall and mainly used xperia play for videos and tv etc.
Being on a boat meant ps3/xbox 360 was not possible so i was a portable gamer for 10yrs nearly. Anyway thanks for the awesome nostalgia hit
I remember a classmate of mine owned this phone. Smartphones were kinda new at that time so personally i prefered the old phones over smart phones. I remember i got an iphone as a gift from my parents, all my other friends still had old non smart phones. I didnt like the swap from non smart to smart phone so i went back to using my old phone.
One thing that frustrated me to know was that Android didn't support XInput controllers until 2013. If the Xperia Play only had XInput support, any game that you can hook a gamepad into would have used the Xperia Play's built-in controls.
Pretty sure Android has never supported Xinput rather Dinput. Xinput is only supported in Windows with Xbox controllers
@@banguseater Thanks, that was probably what I was thinking about. What I meant was that games had to be hardcoded to work with Xperia Play's controls, but if there were an Android-level support for controllers at that time, they would have made it so the Xperia Play's controls get recognized as a regular controller, greatly expanding compatible games.
Sure, the Xperia Play would have needed an L2 and R2, and L3/R3 could have been emulated by tapping one side of the touchpad.
interesting that has never been figured out yet@@Dairunt1
Had this phone as a teenager, wish I was more interested in the nitty gritty of tech at the time so I could have taken more advantage of the device! I did get the g2 play a while ago with the add on accessories and emulation was a dream on it!
I had one of these, but the hing was bad and spoilt after a few months. Loved it.
Dead space late at night on my iPod touch 3g that I had jailbroken and modded to the teeth is peak mobile experience and while I’m sad we will never go back. I’m happy I was there to have it
Bro having a jailbroken iphone or ipod back then was just some sci fi magic. Cydia was insane back then. Once you could no longer jailbreak iphones and they doubled the price I switched to android.
Had this phone when new. It wasnt the greatest phone but used it to emulate GBA and it was a beast for that
I had one of these and the battery life was shocking. I bought a Chinese XL battery that stuck out the back like a brick, it added about 30 mins. I completed RE2 on it and loved it, if the battery was better it would have been amazing.
Bought mine back in 2012 and I thought it was the COOLEST handheld thing to ever release, and I did a LOT of emulation on that thing, mostly for GBA and SNES. I also played thousands of hours of Minecraft on there! Man the possibilities! I honestly think that the Xperia Play is what really sparked the future of handheld gaming and especially handheld emulator hardware. Without it, I imagine everything handheld like this we know now would be a few years further out, or would be less commonplace. I still have my Xperia Play, even though I haven't used it in a few years, and I plan on keeping it for nostalgia.
I owned one of these back when they first launched. 500mb internal space (before apps can be stored on sd cards) was the killer.
When it comes to GB, GBC, and GBA games, I always played with the legit aspect ratio. Just can't stand to play it any other way.
I really wanted one of these things back in the day and, I still want one. Sony really needs to revisit this concept. I would buy one in a heartbeat if they made a new one.
Dammit Jeff, your videos always keep me interested in modding. I feel both blessed and cursed.
Loved the video. Just a little bit of info, Sony Ericsson was a collaboration between Sony and Ericsson, Ericsson are one of the pioneers in mobile telecom and are still around today, Sony eventually purchased Ericssons share in Sony Ericsson and renamed it to Sony Mobile.
jakeDOT.
Sony needed Ericson, to release phones, patents etc.
Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, they needed a telephone company all back then, MS bought Nokia etc.
Wish I could get those old games back
8:48 this minigame is called sort or' splode
"Sony's mobile division" - Ericsson. The Erik in question is Erik Eriksson, the father of Lars Magnus Ericsson, the founder of the Swedish business most commonly referred to as "Ericsson". So indeed, okay!
surprised no one is mentioning the m-con mobile controller, there’s a youtuber developing a slide-out mobile controller. it looks pretty dope.
when used with a custom rom to degoogle it, allow overclocking and using the FPse emulator, it runs games much more smoothly than before. I recommend that to every xperia play owner.
Back then a huge box as a size of a laptop became this with the same power, obviously it's very ahead of its time.
God there was some phone with a push up keyboard that could play assassins creed and resident evil, this is like a superior version of that phone. Wish i knew about this back in the day!
I had two and I liked it, but for retro I had issues with input lag. Also, opening and closing overtime would bring issues with the flat cable. Lastly, internal storage was really bad. But it's already nostalgic to see it running.
great content bro!!
The nostalgia in this video is just hitting hard. I remember how much I used to mess around with new phones and tablets. Learned many things from that and now in the field of computer science, all those things are still helping me out. My first GBA emulator was John GBA, then switched to myBoy cause it had Multiplayer over Bluetooth and Wifi. Life was simple 🥲👌
Its so unreal how far mobile gaming has gotten. Gotten worse that is. The fact that 2011 midrange hardware could run games with this great graphics is wild. But I guess everyone saw much money those terrible pay 2 win slop games were making and by 2013 totally went away with that model.
I had it at the time. It was slow as hell and very hard to get games in. Don't miss it one bit.
That would absolutely be a fantasy to have when I was in school, even now. I could see myself using it today and flexing
Awesome video. I picked up one of these as new old stock last year, since it was such a unique phone and I'm an old tech hoarder, I mean collector. Man, this is going to make me hunt down a older micro sd card and waste some time with retroarch again.
I like the vibes you give bro and for that I have subscribed to your channel 🎉
Someone should REALLY consider making a big comeback of this kind of tech in their phones. Sure, it would make a phone little bit thicker. But we got now some pretty thin foldables and it doesn't bother anyone, right?
Man, I love the gaming commoonity.
Got this when it came out on Verizon , had it for 6months before it got stolen I was only in the 6th grade very thankful for my hardworking parents the phone was so kick ass for Minecraft at the time
the "i know where you live" in the middle of the video was so fucking menacing cause i was watching this while shaving and the window was open
You know I am still using ES File Explorer till right now my phone is Nubia Z60 Ultra android 14, it is the best file explorer ever made, till this day it's working fine on my phone.
The feature by ES File Explorer I love, hiding files, apps backups, LAN file transfer, zip extractor, file to zip, text editor, and many more. No other file explorer has all these features.
I really like the cadence of your voice its very entertaining.
One video and I subscribed. Very cool.
I would have loved to have this phone back in 2011-2014. But ever since Android phones became more powerful over the years and that we've been getting a lot of retro gaming handhelds (some running on Android and I have two Nvidia Shield Portables and one GDP XD+ but I currently use my Galaxy S22 Ultra with gaming controllers), the Xperia Play seems to be more of a antique novelty to look back in the past on what gaming phones could have been. But it would be nice to have to play older Android games that don't support gamepads other than the Xperia Play's controls.
Yeah this is like the classic looks really cool but not as feature packed and powerful as you want it to be , would love to see a modern version of this with a slimmer form factor and more power though
I had a friend who also had a PS Phone back in senior high, i could've sworn that the model she had was able to run Tekken 6 smoothly. Then the memory came back to me as the video went on, it did actually lag a little.
Oh boy, if they make full phone in xperia play 2... With best in class cameras, not worse what you can get in same year samsung. Psp/playstation feeling room. Doesn matter how much it would cost, i would buy it.
But the point is to have sexy looking elegant phone that slides up like original xperia play and has everything top tier phones has... Cameras, 2k screen, with all bells and whistles...
This Masterpiece Of Tech Should Have Been Made I 2024
I like filling up the entire screen, most emulators have updated the games to fill up the screen nicely without looking too stretched
It wasn’t ahead of its time; it was made logically. It’s not the first of its kind; Nokia did something similar, but the execution was poor for the N-Gage. As for this one, Sony didn’t want to create something that could compete with other Sony products, which is why they dropped it. They have a patent for it, so other manufacturers cannot copy it. That’s why they made it. There’s no other phone on the market similar to it because of this. So, when you use a phrase like ‘ahead of its time’, remember that patents expire after 14 to 20 years. This is why when you see many old videos of things you now take for granted and call them ‘ahead of their time’, it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s because of their patents.
Man me and my friends had this phone, we played a lot of games together, great for emulators, good times! oh dude! modding pocket edition too, the memories are flooding back lol
man, I almost pulled a huge credit to get that phone back in the day, it was seriously expensive where I lived, good thing they denied me that much money, I got a galaxy ace and that was good enough for me
My friend had one and I loved playing on it. I almost finished a full run of Ocarina of Time on it
display holds up really well, cool little device
This is so nostalgic lol I remember playing so many of these mobile games on my iPod touch circa 2010
Awesome video jeff keep it up!
I remeber back then there was a port of GTA III, man that was bonkers to play
OMG seeing link2sd gave me major nostalgia to my Galaxy Ace. Its truly wonders what we were able to do with 256mb of storage with games XD
there was a time . the grass was greener, not cleaner and everyone was smiling and not every 2nd person had an iPhone smartphone on this long-suffering...
I got one. It was tough getting a file browser onto it, but then it became my favorite carry around emulation device. That is really saying something, as I used to collect handhelds. PSP, Vita, V90, Ambernic 351MP, RGB30, DS, 3DS, GPD XD, Odin Lite, Switch Lite, OneXplayer. I only ever carried around the Xperia Play. When did you get yours? Enjoy while you can. That internal slide up and down display cable is going to snap in 3...2...1...Good luck trying to find a replacement.
Yeah I had one too but sold it soon after as I didn’t like that it didn’t have much on board space but the main reason I sold it was it was such a chunky phone and carrying it around in my pocket each day it felt so heavy so I got the much slimmer and lighter Samsung galaxy s2 instead - yeah that is one of the problems with a device like this that uses the slide out slide in feature all the time wear an tear
Hey Jeff Love your videos you inspired me to hack my 3ds and switch and now i love those consoles so much more, great vid keep it up
I had one of those phones and I miss it so much 😢😢😢
"Eric's son, not sure who Eric is." 😂😂😂 had me dying so i had to type it.
The dpad and buttons alone are just beautiful
i bought this thing when it came out and is still one of the best phones ive ever owned. I hope they do this again one day 😭
i had (still keep it) the xperia mini pro sk17i wich had the same internal hardware and played soo many games on it... mostly emulators, i used to configure the keyboard to play and it worked really well for me. sadly it got obsolete and i had to buy another phone after 5 years of enjoyment. i miss the keyboard and the small form factor.
Thanks for this,
I loved this generation of mobile gaming.
This a wonderful video.