A few months ago Sega announced that they would be releasing Sonic CD onto home consoles, the Xbox 360 and PS3. They also revealed that they would release the game onto the Android Market, along with iTunes at a later date. One thing that many queried at the time was whether the game would make use of Sony Ericsson Xperia Play’s gamepad. At the time, Sega said it wouldn’t at launch but, may get Xperia Play gamepad support in the future.

A couple of days ago, Sega released Sonic CD on the 360, with the PS3 to follow and a mobile release to come in early 2012. Sega have however, gifted us early with the game being released already. Not only have they released the Sonic game earlier than expected, it also features support for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play’s gamepad. Check out the video below to see how the game plays on the Playstation certified Xperia Play.

Currently, if you wish to purchase one of the great titles from Gameloft such as BackStab, you have to buy the game directly through the Gameloft website from the browser on your Xperia Play. In the future however, Gameloft titles that are Xperia Play optimized will be added to the Android Market.

This gives two advantages. Firstly, you will now be able to pay for the games through Google as you do for other apps and games. This also means your apps and games are more unified. Secondly however and perhaps more importantly, when you need to re-download a game for whatever reason, it will be much easier to do. Currently users often have to contact Gameloft to re-download the games and provide transaction information. With the inclusion of Gameloft games in the Android market, whether you restore your phone or receive a replacement handset, re-downloading these games will no longer be a problem.

Ok, so it may not be new news, it seems many sites missed the release about a month ago however, a nifty app is hitting the news (again) that enables a PS3 Sixaxis controller to be used in conjunction with the Xperia Play.

To use the app, you need to firstly root your phone which may put some users off and of course you need an Xperia Play and a PlayStation 3 Sixaxis controller! Once connected via a computer, the PS3 controller will then work with the Xperia Play when playing games specifically enhanced for use with the Xperia Play’s own control system, as shown in the demo video below:

We’ve provided information on how to root the Xperia handsets here before and in the past rooting has always been for a positive reason. The main reason for rooting is that it allows you to remove preinstalled apps, either installed by Sony Ericsson such as Timescape, or network specific apps such as Vodafone’s 360 application. There are of course other positive reasons to root your handset and with Google Android being a pretty open OS, rooting hasn’t been much of a problem. That may change soon however.

It appears that the Android Market has been updated on Xperia handsets which adds a link to Sony Ericsson apps. The update doesn’t actually appear to be a market update however, as there wasn’t a notification and uninstalling any Market updates, does not revert the Market to how it was.

The new market sees the “My App” icon replaced with a phone icon and the words Sony Ericsson. Clicking on this will show you various Sony Ericcson apps, like Xperia Hot Shots, or Timescape extensions and also apps supported by your handset, such as FourSquare, TweetDeck, SwiftKey Keyboard and many more. For those who use the my apps icon frequently, you will now need to press the menu icon and select “my apps” that way to view what you currently have downloaded on your handset.