Posted by Mike Evans in Coming Soon on January 7, 2011

The phone we were all hoping to see at CES this year was the Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone (or Xperia Play as it’ll be known), but unfortunately, despite some heavy hints by Sony referring to a PlayStation ecosystem of phones and tablets, no actual hardware was on display – only the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc.

Fortunately, one lucky young Chinese blogger has somehow managed to get his hands on a PlayStation phone, and settled down in what seems to be a Chinese cafe to shoot some videos of it in action.
Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone vs a Sony PSP Go

Comparing the PlayStation Phone with the current PSP Go

When you see the PlayStation phone placed next to a PSP Go, the similarities are obvious. Both share a slide-out gaming keypad with the iconic PlayStation buttons on them, and are very similar in size. So similar, you wonder why on earth Sony didn’t create the PlayStation phone sooner (the answer, of course, is corporate politics!)

The similarities end there, though. Inside, the two devices are very very different. With its 1GHz CPU, the PlayStation phone is, on paper at least, three times faster than the PSP Go, with a raft of features such as GPS, 5 megapixel camera, 512MB RAM (the PSP Go has a measly 64MB) and 4″ touchscreen, which the PSP Go can only dream of.

That said, the hardware architectures of the different devices are very different, so although the PlayStation Phone looks the srtonger device on paper, it may not be from a pure gaming performance perspective when we finally see it in action, simply becuase the PSP Go has been optimized for gameplay throughout. The PlayStation Phone, in contrast, uses Android, which is not optimized for gameplay.

Until the PlayStation Phone is finally released in its expected Xperia Play guise, though, we’ll have to make do with the following videos.

Videos of the PlayStation phone in action

[Source: Engadget]