Ayaneo Pocket Play, the return of the Xperia Play concept?

Nearly 15 years ago, Sony released the Xperia Play, a smartphone for gamers, distinguished by a sliding mechanism that revealed a controller and buttons, transforming the phone into a true console. Bold, but certainly too ahead of its time, as commercial success eluded it. Ayaneo Pocket Play: the return of the smartphone-gaming console. Now that smartphones are increasingly accepted as fully-fledged gaming devices, perhaps the time has come for this feature to return to the forefront and be fully embraced by users. This is certainly the gamble taken by Ayaneo, a company specializing in portable consoles running Windows or Android: Pocket Play is Ayaneo's first smartphone, adopting the concept introduced by Sony in 2011. A Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign will soon be launched to assess the desirability of such a device, a simple smartphone in appearance, but a game console when needed.