After the numerous leaks in the last one month, Sony Ericsson announced the Xperia Play along with a bunch of other Xperia branded handsets at their on-going event in MWC, Barcelona. The handset is powered by a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor with the Adreno 205 GPU core handling the graphics department.

The handset sports a 4-inch LCD with a resolution of 854×480. The Xperia Play is a PlayStation Certified’ handset and runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread with Sony’s custom UI on top of it.

As evident from the picture above, the Play will sport a slide-out gamepad to fulfill all your on-the-move gaming needs. The Xperia Play will come pre-loaded with one legendary PlayStation game. The name of the game was not mentioned by Sony, so this remains a mystery for now.

The back of the handset will feature a 5MP camera. The Xperia Play will start shipping from next month i.e. March. The handset will hit the Verizon network in the states in early spring.

Here is a video of the Xperia Play in action -:

Along with the Xperia Play, Sony Ericsson also announced the PlayStation Suite. All handsets which will be PlayStation Certified’ will be able to access the PlayStation store which will be launched by Sony, later this year.

The PlayStation Store will launch with more than 50 titles on-board. Some existing gaming titles will also be optimized for the PlayStation Certified platform.