O2 announces delay to Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone

A BLOG by mobile network operator O2 has confirmed a delay to it selling Sony Ericsson's gaming phone, the Xperia Play, for weeks due to unfixed bugs.

The blog post by O2's head of its testing team, Stuart Hibberd, explained that bugs in the phone's software that haven't been fixed in time will mean a delay to the planned launch date of 1 April.

Hibberd explained that every phone that O2 sells must go through weeks of testing to test every feature so that it is sure that customers will get a "great experience" Any bugs found are then worked on to iron them out prior to launching the device, but in this case the bugs haven't been fixed in time.

Hibberd said, "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."

He went on to say that the team will be working with Sony Ericsson over the next couple of weeks to fix the problems and that the phone won't go on sale until this is done. The launch party for the Xperia Play is coming up this week and the phone will cost around £500. µ