Many a gamer have been anticipating the release of Xperia, the next-generation in gaming smartphones, where PlayStation has taken the reigns. At the Mobile World Congress 2011, held from today through the 17th in Barcelona, the company finally unveiled that gamers will be able to get their own Black or White Sony Ericsson Xperia Play phone as soon as March of this year.

This iPhone rival, consisting of a touchscreen phone panel with a slide-out gaming control, will have the usual functions a PlayStation controller entails including the dual analog joysticks and action buttons. Not only will you be able to utilize its talk-time of more than eight hours on a single charge, you can game for up to five and a half hours playing more than 50 classic games such as Guitar Hero and Dead Space while you're on-the-go. Sony has even taken that extra step to enable multi-player mobile gaming for several of the games available for the Xperia, and in 3D to boot. It will also allow access to game content via Playstation Suite, due out sometime this year.

Xperia is chalk-full of goodies, with 9ComputerStore.com summarizing it best:

"The new Sony Ericsson Xperia Play is armed with a 4-inch FWVGA TFT multi-touch display with 854 x 480 Resolution, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, Qualcomm Adreno 205 graphics, Android 2.3 Gingerbread, 5.1 megapixel camera with auto-focus and LED Flash, Front facing VGA Camera, support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, A-GPS, DLNA and microSD card slot with 8GB preinstalled, and the max up to 32GB."

"Xperia Play also features 3-axis accelerometer & e-compass, PlayStation dashboard launcher, full suite of Google Apps, digital D pad, 2 shoulder buttons and 4 PlayStation icons with 5 hours, 35 minutes of battery life to last a single game session."

The cost of this device has yet to be confirmed, however, if the speculated €649 (£546) cost that has been floating around online is something to gauge it by, it's safe to say many piggy banks will suffer for the cause.