Delay on the Xperia Play

Stuart Hibberd, head of O2’s testing team, explains why there’ll be a delay on O2 selling the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play.

As the head of O2’s device testing team, my team and I see every phone that O2 will be selling before it goes on sale. Our job, as I mentioned in my last blog post, is to make sure these phones are ready for our customers before they go on sale. This means we rigorously test each phone, often for weeks, and try every single feature. We get to know each phone inside and out and, by the time it goes on sale, need to be absolutely certain it’ll offer our customers a great experience.

Sometimes we discover bugs and issues on a phone. This is perfectly normal – bugs can appear in every form of software. When we discover these issues we work with our phone manufacturer partners to fix them and make sure that O2 customers will have the best possible experience when they use their phone.

This is what has happened with the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY. We’ve been testing the phone non-stop for weeks and have found some bugs in the software that, if they’re not fixed, means customers won’t have a great experience. We’ve been working with Sony Ericsson to get these bugs ironed out, but haven’t been able to get them fixed in time for us to be able to launch the phone on April 1st as we originally planned.

At O2 we’re really excited about the Xperia PLAY – we announced earlier on this year that we’d be selling an exclusive white version. We want to make sure that any issues with the software are resolved before it goes on sale so we’ll be working with Sony Ericsson over the next couple of weeks and we’ll be blogging regularly to update you. You can also sign up for updates on our Coming Soon page at http://j.mp/O2XperiaPlay.