Sony Ericsson hopes the long-awaited and will wedge the company back into relevance in a smartphone market that's been dominated by HTC, Motorola, and Apple phones.

"This is the best smartphone ever and will open up new possibilities for entertainment," said Rikko Sakaguchi, VP and "chief creation officer" at Sony Ericsson at the event.

The Xperia Play is powered by Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). It features a slide-out panel containing the Sony gaming D-pad (for in-game direction control) on the left side, the four symbol-etched game control buttons on the right, and a set of circular touchpads in the middle, which act like analog joysticks for operating certain games.

If you're used to on-screen gaming controls as I am, the physical gaming controllers on the Xperia Play may take some getting used to, but it's a much better experience. The controls were very responsive to the touch and their placement and functions seemed intuitive to me in the several games I played.

The phone packs a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and the display is a 4-inch Bravia (480 by 854 pixels FWVGA) touchscreen with an Adreno GPU graphics processor inside.