BARCELONA, Spain — Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play is the phone we have wanted ever since Sony’s PSP was invented. It is, in any meaningful way, the first official PSP phone, and we got to play with it at the Mobile World Congress. How does it do?

Pretty well. With the gamepad tucked out of the way, the Play is a fairly humdrum Android phone, running 2.3 Gingerbread on a Snapdragon processor and equipped with a 5-MP camera. As a phone, it is perfectly fine.

But slide that pad out, and things get fun, fast. You get a D-pad, the four familiar PlayStation “shape” buttons, start and select buttons, and a home button that mimics the regular one next to the screen. There are also two touchpads and a pair of shoulder buttons — around back, behind the screen.

To drive the graphics, the Play has its own GPU, the 1-GHz Adreno 205. This allows the phone to push the polygons around and display them at 60 fps. Here you can see it in action, along with me getting my ass kicked in the preinstalled Bruce Lee game:

Holding it like this, you forget immediately that it is a phone. The buttons are fine, although if you were playing a Streetfighter-style game, those D-pad rolling special moves would be a little tricky. The shoulder buttons are easy to reach, even for my big hands, and the screen hinge is solid enough that things don’t flop around whilst playing.

Games will come from the Android Market, and there will be a separate PlayStation Store for buying old PS1 games, which will run on the Play.

It’s impressive, but I’m worried that it will be too expensive to be successful. Amazon.de lists it at 650 euro, which converts to $880. That’s a lot of cash, and even Sony Ericsson’s promise of 50 launch titles might not be enough to distract you from the sticker price. The launch date has yet to be announced, but could be as early as March.

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