With its Xperia Play device formally announced, Sony Ericsson has revealed resources to enable developers to get to grips with the hardware.

Part of this is highlighting how it all works, notably the Snapdragon processor, which consists of a 1 GHz Scorpion CPU and a 245 MHz Adreno 205 GPU.

As an Android 2.3 phone, the basic framework is the Android SDK.

There are also specific gaming APIs for system, audio, network, graphics (OpenGL ES 2.0), GUI and math operations provided by the Z-system development kit (ZDK).

How to touch me

Something more complex however is handling how the analog touch pad works.

This requires native code, in conjunction with the Android Native Development Kit (NDK).

"Because the native activity runs on the same thread as your Android application, you’ll need to take actions in your code to prevent the native activity from blocking the application. This could force you into some tricky thread synchronisation operations," Sony Ericsson points out.

Help is provided using the static helper library provided in the NDK.

You can find out more details about developing for the Xperia Play at the Sony Ericsson Development Blog.