[Xperia Play Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CZroe:
I've owned my Sony Ericsson Xperia Play 4G (R800at) for a week and a half now. It's actually my first Android experience and I am having serious iOS withdrawls despite being an adamant critic of many things Apple/iOS. Well, I did install it on my HP TouchPad a few weeks ago but I haven't really poked around yet.

Anyway, when I first charged it, it took almost all day. I was using it while charging it, but it still seemed ridiculously slow. After that, I would find it draining excessively fast despite only having a couple downloaded apps (OpenWatch, Pandora, etc) and rebooting to make sure that they were closed. Twice in the first week I set my alarm and woke to find it had drained completely and shut off (no alarm). This is inconsistent: other days it seems fine. I'm stumped bue, perhaps it doesn't like being on an AT&T Micro Cell? More testing required for that theory.

Anyway, I also noticed that performance is inexplicably bad some times and not others. After a fresh restart, my home screen will freeze and prompt to wait or force-quit. This seems completely random and it affects other apps too. For example, I'll start an SNES emulator and find it unplayable about half the time (choppy FPS and stuttering audio) and perfectly playable other times (no noticable frameskip or audio stuttering). If I reboot the phone first, you would expect results to be consistent but they often are not and I get the same choppy performance. Though I seem to have better performance with SNES9x Ex, both it and SNES A.D. have this issue.

If this is related to SD card performance, I've noticed that some shortcuts on my home screens take a while to load from the SD card and have disappeared entirely on more than one occasion (had to recreate them).

Anyway, I see reviews praising the performance in emulators and the decent battery life with no mention of these issues, which leads me to believe that something is seriously wrong. How useful is an alarm that dies in less than one sleep session? It's bad enough that it doesn't have a timer function (seriously?).

Speaking of emulators, I am picky when it comes to classic games and I can perceive that there is definitely latency in the games I have tried. I play on a level that requires instant response so many players may never notice, but there are only so many times I can run off a ledge that I would have jumped off of safely before I have to wonder if there is some inherant latency in the input method. I'm sure the emulator authors are more likely to blame but none of the other native games seem to require that level of precision for me to tell. Has anyone made any kind of test program to measure latency?

Now, the AT&T sales associate told me that I would have visual voicemail. I do not and I had no voicemail at all for the first week (traditional VM could not be set up over the phone; had to be corrected on their end). Having no Android experience, I just assumed that all Android phone supported it along with major carriers and traditional VM was included only for unsupported carriers. Was I wrong? I also assumed that there would be Android equivalents for all the basic iOS apps like Notes, Clock (with timer/stop-watch functions), screen capture function, and battery percentage in the status bar, but I know now that this is not the case (sorely disappointed; patent disputes to blame?). I looked on Sony Ericsson's webpage and see that they once advertised that the Xperia Play had Panoramic Camera with Touch-to-Focus but they edited it out, which I only discovered when I tried to snap a photo of some notes and found it impossible to focus. The forums were in a tizzy over that, after they had edited that unsupported and falsely advertised feature out when I noticed another feature that was missing and STILL ADVERTISED. Many times I had wanted to use the screen capture function but had not yet had the chance to look up how, but the online feature page clearly said that it was activated with a touch of the Power/Lock button, which I had used many times. When it turned out to be another example of an unsupported feature that was advertised for this phone, I began to wonder if the AT&T sales person was the one at fault or if he were duped by an earlier list that included VVM.

Yes. I know I can approximate VVM functionality through Google Voice and I plan to. I am still disappointed that I can't fully integrate it with native text messaging like SMS GV Extensions could on a jailbroken iDevice, especially now that Apple does something similar with iMessage (I do not have a texting plan).

I have another similar example. I was wondering why the Xperia exclusives weren't all listed together under the "Play Games" browser that can be set to launch when opened. I found a reference to the launcher that includes it in the phone's built-in "User Guide," which always gives some error about not being able to find a user guide before displaying it anyway. :rolleyes: So, the reference said that it can be set to auto-launch when the phone is opened just like the "Play Games" interface. The option is clearly not there. That's probably just an example of them getting confused by their own confusing attempts to simplify things. There should be a central and configurable way to launch all games but there is no option in the "Play Games" interface to add or link to your own games or the other Xperia exclusives. Having Need For Speed Shift on the full app drawer listing only with Need For Speed Pursuit on the "Play Games" app and Crash Bandicoot on the Playstation Pocket app that only accessible through the full app drawer listing just means you have a ton of places to go before you even know what games came pre-loaded on the phone! I have a co-worker who's played my phone nightly for NFSP and doesn't even know it also includes NFSS (I won't tell him so that I can have a little more time with my phone ;)). It turns out that he's a long-time Android user too. FWIW, I *refuse* to call either PS Pocket or Play Games an "XMB" like so many others have refered to it as because it is *not*. The "Xross Media Bar" refers to a user interface that includes a list of catergories intersecting with sub-categories, which this certainly does not. Think of a rail-road "x-ing." A wavy, colored, background does not an XMB make.

So I'm going to see if I can swap out the phone if there is a hardware problem causing my battery and performance woes but that leads me to my next question: What if I have to swap it out after the free games are no longer offered? Can I keep the exclusives that are on there? Before I get flamed for not searching that question, I'll search the "how" of the matter later and only ask in case a quick answer can be included to my other problems. :)

Thanks in advance!