Look in that product release press conference. It’s a smartphone. It’s a handheld gaming system. It’s the Xperia PLAY by Sony Ericsson! Of course, this gaming device business productivity mobile runs the world’s favorite hybrid OS with Gingerbread Android 2.3 and is now available from Verizon wireless for $200.

At 4.7 inches high and 2.4 inches wide and about half-an-inch thick it’s no slim device. Weighing a solid 6.1 ounces, this provides a stable foundation for its 4-inch touch screen, slide-out game pad, dual touch joystick, and shoulder buttons. All provided in a mold poured of molten brushed aluminum and absolute pwnage.

(Perhaps not that last thing.)

Mike Gikas over at Consumer Reports got his hands on an Xperia PLAY and did a release review of the phone with his in-house gaming expert, Matt Ferretti.

Gaming. Gaming on the Play is very much like using one of the Sony PlayStation portables, the PSP and PSP go. The Play’s display is of a comparable size and its controls, with the trademark circle, X, square, and triangle symbols, will be instantly familiar to PlayStation veterans.

The controls seem highly responsive, though the joystick, which is flat, took a little time to master. The touch screen is a real plus over the static screens of the PSP and PSP go. It lets you quickly set up and change game parameters with a tap of a finger rather than fumbling with different buttons to do so. During actual game play, the display’s touch controls deactivate.

Like other gaming handhelds, the Play has built-in Wi-Fi that enables you to engage other gamers via the Web…

Display. Type, including the tiny type in Google calendar entries, appeared quite sharp. Colors on the 480×854-resolution display were natural in appearance, though they were a tad darker than those on other displays I’ve recently seen from LG, Motorola, and Samsung…

Data entry. The Xperia Play comes with only one virtual keyboard, the Android version. I found it more than adequate for the job, because of the snazzy tools Android 2.3 provides for fine-tuning text entries. These tools include easier text selection with subtle finger gestures and the ability to edit text while receiving alternative suggestions from the app.

The phone itself is a solid smartphone with everything that the young business professional or college student would want in the phone—and onto that they grafted a fully functioning PSP. The bulkiness of the phone itself is more than simply forgivable, it’s expected: gamers would rather have something concrete in their hands.

It’s display is beautiful, using an Adreno 205 graphics coprocessor, and it runs atop the powerful architecture of a 1GHz Snapdragon II processor, supported by 400MB of memory expandable to 32GB via microSD.

Looking at not just the phone, but the marketing from Sony Ericsson, it’s obvious that this company knows how to sell to gamers.

This phone is a scintillatingly solid platform for business use and doesn’t lack for anything a smartphone needs, but it’s also overpowered for all its business functions and not at all underpowered for game functions. This device provides ample evidence that smartphones are growing in influence in mobile gaming and not just for the casual gamer—the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY is the hardcore gamer’s answer to bridging the gap between work and play.

As for further evidence Sony Ericsson knows what they’re doing?

Watch more of these promotional advertisements at their blog.

It’s good to be the king, baby. Did I mention this phone appears to be made out of crystallized awesome?

But can it play Angry Birds? …or my favorite Plants vs. Zombies (by PopCap Games)?