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Already familiar with Sony Ericsson's upgrade software from my previously mentioned X10 mini experiences, my next strategy was to hit up the company's support website. There, I found four different software packages available for download, three of them Windows-based. The PC Companion utility was the one that I'd already used before:

it includes (among other things) firmware upgrade capabilities, as does the seeming functionally redundant Update Service program. Also offered were a multimedia sync program called Media Go, which again seemed redundant with that same feature in PC Companion, and a Mac OS X-tailored functional twin of Media Go called Media Sync.

I tried PC Companion first. After installing it on my Windows Vista Ultimate-based Dell XPS M133 laptop, a tediously long process which also installs a suite of device drivers, I plugged in the Xperia Play (after first ensuring that the handset was not in USB Debugging mode) and all seemed to go well at first:

I was then prompted to change the phone's connection mode:

by first unmounting the phone:

and then switching it in to MTP (media transfer protocol) mode...an option that the phone didn't even offer to me:

The only option that the phone did give me was to remount it, an operation that inevitably led to a connection failure notification, and an encouragement to (fruitlessly) repeat the multi-step attempt:

Internet research suggested that I might have better success if I manually dismounted the phone's microSD card before connecting the Xperia Play to my laptop, but that attempt only led to an endless circle-cursor on the phone's display upon USB tether, until I pulled the plug (manually broke the USB connection).

Sigh. Next step; Update Service:

which also explicitly listed the Xperia Play as a supported handset:

In this case, I needed to first power off the phone, then hold down the Android 'back' button while connecting it to the laptop over USB:

However, after doing so, Update Service reported to me that no firmware updates were available:

Sigh, again. And, as it turns out, the firmware version situation is even worse than I originally thought. Not only was the latest software version unavailable to me, my Xperia Play was still running its original Android v2.3.2 build, whereas handset owners in other geographies had started receiving an Android 2.3.3 upgrade (complete with extensive Facebook integration) in early June. Verizon's qualification of the upgrades is presumably the availability bottleneck here.

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