[Xperia Play General] FK1983:
I TOTALLY disagree with you on this, I think the display on the Play is great, nice and bright, not quite as "vibrant" as some of the latest HTC and Samsung screens though but still a very nice display.

Indoors its fantastic, the auto brightness is also VERY good! outdoors its one of the best devices I have had for viewing in the sun, the iphone 4 and galaxy s and desire s were terrible outside when it was sunny.

LOL, My girlfriend has the 9700s and the sound volume and quality is nowhere near as good as on the Plays, with XLoud the Play is in another league.

The play has the best sound I have EVER heard from a mobile device, its more like a home system how loud and clear it is!

Honestly, none of the benchmark tests are very accurate but as a VERY rough idea I did a few tests using Quadrant on my overclocked Play a few days ago, starting with the standard 1ghz stock speed going up to 1.7ghz overclocked.

Score - Speed

1585 – 1ghz (Stock)

1653 – 1.1ghz (OC)

1864 – 1.2ghz (OC)

1953 – 1.3ghz (OC)

2125 – 1.4ghz (OC)

2259 – 1.5ghz (OC)

2345 – 1.6ghz (OC)

2392 – 1.7ghz (OC)

The Galaxy 2 reaching 4,000 shows how wrong the benchmarking is though as in real world performance the Galaxy 2 isn't far off the stock Scorpion/Adreno CPU's that are used in the Play and Arc.

It only works in the Gallery and Video section of the phone but yeah, it certainly makes your images and videos look a lot better, more vibrant and detailed, Would be even better if they could get it working for everything including apps and games!

Oh yes!, the Play was made for gaming, it comes with Asphalt 6 HD and runs at 60FPS on the device (stock!), it handles EVERY game even the very latest and most demanding ones with absolute ease,

I have Fast 5, Hot Pursuit, Muffin Knight (amazing!), Guerrilla Bob, Backstab, Nova 2, Starfront: Collision, Lets Golf 2, Sandstorm, Cordy (stunning game), NFS: Shift etc and ALL run perfect and ALL also work perfectly with the Plays gamepad, the gamepad makes a HUGE difference!

The Play also uses ultra fast DDR2 Ram, the only current android device to use it, this is why (along with the Adreno gpu) it handles games really well, this is also a big reason why the Play can outperform devices like the Galaxy 2 when it comes to gaming.

I used to have an iphone 4 and having no gamepad was horrible, games were so hard to play specially any that require skill, this is why the Play is the best gaming phone out, nothing else comes close thanks to the gamepad.

"Xperia Optimized" just means the game will work 100% with the gamepad.

The only difference is the Play uses DDR2 memory and has a gamepad, the Arc doesn't, everything else performance wise is identical,

At the moment Android isn't using dual core CPU's very well, this is why the latest "Dual Core" devices don't perform as well as people expected and is also why you see so many complaints about it.

Android isn't designed for Dual Core devices yet, in time this will change but hence why there isn't a need for dual core right now.

Both devices are powerful, the Galaxy 2 is newer and is getting a lot of attention as its so new, all I will say is the Scorpian/Adreno 205 CPU found in the Play is a VERY capable chipset, it is designed for very high demanding gaming and apps.

Few examples:

Shader Performance

•Normalized to iPad2 resolution

•From single color:

• 1.4ms iPad2

• 3.5ms XperiaPlay

• 3.8ms Tegra2

• 14.3ms iPhone3Gs

•To fully per-pixel bump spec:

• 19.3ms iPad2

• 18.4ms XperiaPlay

• 47.7ms Tegra2

• 122.4ms iPhone3Gs

Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm's boss says that Single core snapdragon (found in the Play) with latest drivers outperform the current dual core processors.

"Looking at benchmarking tests for our single core product, it outperforms against dual core products from our competitors,’ said Jacbos.

He added: ‘The performance that you can get is literally much more than just counting the number of cores on a chip - it about how these cores work together seamlessly and efficiently. Compared to our competitors' [dual-core chips] they use 50 to 75 per cent more power to deliver the same performance compared to our single-core CPUs.’

I have around 200mb free on average although it will free up more if required, Asphalt 6 only uses 65mb, backstab only uses 62mb, Muffin Knight only uses 36mb, the latest games don't need lots of ram, shocking but true!

Multitasking on the Play is the same as any other decent Android device out there, it is good but with Android in general it could be a bit better, it needs to shut down apps that cause issues more quickly in my view, hopefully Android/Google improves this!