Uh oh: Verizon drops price of Sony’s Xperia Play to $100

Verizon and Sony Ericsson have cut the price of the Xperia Play to $100 with a two-year contract, making it one of the cheapest full-featured Android phones, and still the only one with a full slide-out gamepad.

The PlayStation phone may already be on its way out. Today, Verizon cut the price of the Sony Ericsson phone from $200 to $100 with a two-year contract (via Phandroid). Despite having graphics that exceed the Sony PSP, running Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and featuring a complete slide-out Sony gamepad, the Xperia Play may not be selling well. While phone prices often drop within six months and many phones don’t even stay on the market longer than that, the Play was a high profile launch from Sony and represented its first major collaboration with Verizon in some time.

Reviewing the Xperia Play, our own Nick Mokey was impressed with the attempt, but found the phone to be a bit bulky due to the keyboard.

“If you want the most gaming-friendly Android phone, this is it. But don’t cancel your PSP Go purchase just yet,” writes Mokey. “The first “PlayStation-certified” phone is only a handheld gaming console in the same way a bicycle with an engine bolted onto it is a motorcycle – the difference is all in the details. With compromised controls, a small library of available titles that work with them and sometimes lukewarm controller integration on the games that do, the Xperia Play has a ways to go before any real gamer would swap a PSP or Nintendo DS for it. Even so, we have to give Sony Ericsson credit for adding game controls to an Android handset without destroying its credibility as a phone. Unless the bulk bothers you, the sacrifices made for hard game controls are quite livable, making the Xperia Play a worthy consideration for smartphones gamers sick of swiping at glass.”

Of course, any lack of sales is speculation on our part. This price drop could simply be a planned promotional discount. In any case, if you’re a heavy gamer and were considering an Xperia Play, there is no better time to pick one up. Sony claims that more PlayStation compatible devices will be coming in the future, and the PS Vita will have some form of connectivity, but for now, this is it. Still, we can’t help but wonder if Sony won’t give it another go with a 4G LTE version of the Play. Now that might get us excited.