Console gamers will tell you that as fun as mobile games built for touchscreens can be, everything’s better with physical buttons and sticks. Sony Xperia T2 Ultra owners are fortunate enough to have the best of both worlds, because their handsets will be compatible with the PlayStation 4’s DualShock 4 controller.

Owners of the Sony Xperia Play, get your thumbs ready for some beta testing. Tonight, Sony has released a public beta for Ice Cream Sandwich that runs on the Xperia Play. Sure, it was available through custom ROMs, but nothings better than an official release. Sony wants your help testing the software.

There’s going to be plenty of hardware debuting at CES this year, but let’s not forget that software companies will also be in the house. Sega is one such company, and they are planning to debut their Virtua Tennis Challenge for mobile devices, specifically the Sony Xperia Play. Sega has only recently broken into the mobile gaming world, but they have every intention of having a bigger presence in the near future.

Popular cloud gaming service Onlive has updated their Android app to include support for Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY’s slide-out game controls. The Onlive service offers on-demand top-tier console gaming streamed live to any supported Android device. Cloud based gaming is considered by many to be the future of gaming, and because everything is rendered server-side, users of “last year’s” hardware have the ability to play “this year’s” games.