The rumored PlayStation Phone, also known as the Zeus Z1, will hit stores in April after officially launching at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona two months from now. More specifically, it will be announced at Sony Ericsson's press conference on the Sunday evening. "Sony Ericsson is going big on this one," an anonymous source told Pocket-lint, "but although it will get a Feb launch, it won't be in shops until April."
This would imply that we won't be able to see the Zeus Z1 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. It also means those itching to play the latest games on the device in the first quarter of 2011 will have to wait a little while longer.
To make things a little more interesting, according to OHIM's community trade mark database (via Engadget), Sony Ericsson has registered a few EU trademarks recently, including Xperia Play, Xperia Arc, Xperia Duo, and Xperia Neo. Sony Ericsson's PR firm Jung Relations has registered a variety of Xperia Play domain names, including XperiaPlay.com, XperiaPlay.net, and XperiaPlay.org. Xperia Play definitely seems like the most appropriate name for the leaked PlayStation Phone, but of course that doesn't mean that's the final name.
Almost three months ago, the first details of the PlayStation Phone leaked out, claiming it would come with a custom Sony Marketplace for purchasing and downloading games designed for the new platform. The device sports a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655, 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM, and a screen ranging from 3.7 to 4.1 inches. The handset also includes a long touchpad in the center which is apparently multitouch, as well as familiar PlayStation shoulder buttons. There's no Sony Memory Stick slot, but there is support for microSD cards.
Earlier this month, we saw the PlayStation Phone running Android 2.3 (codenamed Gingerbread) but it would be nice if Sony Ericsson put Android 3.0 (codenamed Honeycomb) on it before release. Still, maybe it will work on improving the current software in order to get better performance out of it.