Smartphones seemed to converge into one near-uniform design around a decade ago. Sure there are some outliers from companies trying to do anything to separate themselves from the herd, but we all mostly have the same one: thin, black rectangles with a touch screen on one side. The first decade of the century however was the Cambrian explosion of mobile technology. They came with descriptors such as swivels, sliders, clamshells, candy bars, and they could be tall, thin, wide, chunky, or even taco shaped.

I was a fan of Sony Ericsson’s phones, mainly because they were offered as part of my network provider’s subscription deals. I worked my way through all the letters of their series as they were released, and for purely sentimental purposes, I still have a W850i with a long-dead battery in a box somewhere.

The last model I owned before migrating to the modern tablet design was the Xperia PLAY, Sony’s 2011 grasp at the handheld gaming market, otherwise known as the “PlayStation phone”. It was long-awaited and much anticipated and arrived with quite a lot of hype behind it. It was a slider phone which revealed a gamepad when opened, and featured a 4” LCD screen with 480×854 resolution. Here’s Kristen Schaal advertising the phone by playing with herself:

“Before Kristen knows it, I’m stabbing her in the boob.”

It was a fun idea in concept, but I found it to be horrible in practice. Too small, too light, and too thin, I found it too uncomfortable to use as a game controller for very long. I mostly remember trying and failing to play Grand Theft Auto on it during my lunch breaks at my crappy job.

In the end this phone came and went incredibly quickly, as consumers did not seem to want a handheld gaming phone, they were lured away to the iPhone 4 and corresponding Android smartphones. Nowadays regarded as a complete failure, was the PLAY too much of a “gimmick product”? Was the number of games optimised for it too small, and were the sales of them too dismal to continue? Although figures were never publicly reported, the phone didn’t receive the Android 4.0 update the next year, and whilst a PLAY 2 was rumoured, it never came to fruition. One prototype did surface on the Chinese equivalent of eBay some years ago, however:

Have a great day everyone! And as always, make sure to take care of yourselves.