Sony Ericsson Xperia Play vs Google Nexus S

Already available for pre-order at online stores, the Google Nexus is soon going to be launched in India. We compare the Samsung-branded Google Nexus S to another upcoming Sony Ericsson's Playstation Phone, the Xperia Play.

Check out the specs and features comparison below for these two devices to find out which smartphone is worth your hard-earned money.

Form
Sony Ericsson Xperia Play - 119 x 62 x 16 mm, 175g
Samsung Google Nexus S - 123.9 x 63 x 10.9 mm, 129g

The Xperia Play’s form is of course partly guided by the fact that it’s a hybrid smartphone and handheld gaming system, while a lot of phones play games these days it’s rarely as much a part of the design as the normal phone functions of making calls and the like.

The portable console element also means it can get away with some slightly flashier styling than your average handset and it’s certainly interesting to look at with its sharp lines and strangely angular yet also curvy corners.

Silver parts on mobile handsets are frequently poorly done in nasty plastic but Sony has done well here and have made it work, which is just as well considering much of the phone is metallic in colour – the entire slide-out gamepad, in fact.

The Xperia Play does look good, perhaps it might not have been able to get away with the blingy styling if it were just a phone but the styling does suit its role as a dual-role gaming handset, it definitely looks the part.

The Google Nexus is a much more traditional affair, and we do really mean traditional in that now old-fashioned looking ‘make it as rounded as possible’ way. It’s not a particularly pretty phone to say the least.

Winner – Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

Display
Sony has gone with a 4-inch, LED backlit, LCD capacitive touchscreen for the Xperia play which is in 480x854 pixels in resolution.

Going for something a bit snazzier makes sense on such a gaming-oriented handset, if you’re spending a lot of time looking at stunning graphics you likely want a screen that’s sharp, bright and clear and that is certainly what you’ll get on this phone.

Other features include the Timescape user interface and multi-touch, as well as gyro and accelerometer sensors for motion-based gaming and auto-rotate.

The Google Nexus S also has a 4-inch screen, this one is one of Samsung’s Super Amoled Plus capacitive touchscreen at 480x800 pixel resolution.

The Nexus’ screen features a contoured display with curved glass screen and an oleophobic surface which goes some way to repelling fingerprint oils.

Multi-touch, gyro and accelerometer are all there too. There’s not too much difference between these displays, the slightly higher resolution on the Xperia is the only thing which stands out but it’s not leaps and bounds ahead by any means.

Winner - Draw

Processor
It was fairly obvious the Xperia Play was going to be powerful and indeed it is with a 1GHz Qualcomm Scorpion processor running the MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset and an Adreno 205 graphics processing unit (GPU).

It’s nothing to sneeze at but this is an area where we can’t help but feel Sony has held back more than they should for this gaming-specific device, a dual-core processor would have made a big difference here and certainly would have future-proofed the Xperia Play against the abundance of dual-core and later quad-core phones expected in the next year and a half or so.

The Google Nexus is in a similar position, it isn’t exactly lacking in power with a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor on the Hummingbird chipset and with a PowerVR SGX540 GPU – it will do a good job of multitasking in Android and running many of the current apps or games on the market, and will continue to do so in the near future, but it will begin to dwindle in the face of the multi-core frenzy which has already begun with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S II, LG Optimus 3D and the HTC Evo 3D, to name but a few.

Both these phones have got plenty of power but the Xperia has, as might be expected, a little more to it with a slightly more up-to-date processor, if the Nexus was sporting a Cortex A9 it’d be a different story, but as it stands the Sony just has an edge.

Winner – Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

Storage
The Xperia Play has 400 MB of internal storage and 380 MB of RAM, now, while there’s nothing wrong with this it is a bit that strange Sony didn’t think to ramp up the numbers a bit here for such a gaming-oriented handset.

More RAM would make the games run even smoother and with only 400MB storage we can’t see users being able to store many games on the Xperia Play together with saving data and other kinds of media typically stored on phones these days such as images, videos, music and contacts.

There is some respite though as the Xperia Play supports Micro SD cards up to 32GB and comes with an 8GB card as standard, but even so it still would benefit from more onboard storage and more RAM.

Samsung has provided for the Google Nexus S much better with 16GB of storage and 512MB of RAM, though sadly there’s no card support.

No card support is a big mistake in our book but despite this the Nexus is still the better phone in terms of raw storage capacity and RAM.

Winner – Samsung Google Nexus S

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