Sony Ericsson intros Xperia minis
Gingerbread biccies
Sony Ericsson has outed 2011's successors to 2010's Xperia X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro.
The new ones take the same names as their predecessors, minus the 'X10' and with a SE's newfound e.e. cummings-like disdain for capital letters.
Both mini and mini pro - we will use capitals hereafter - are based on 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs and run Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
Like the recently release Xperia Arc, they have "Reality Display" screens, here 3in in size with a 320 x 480 resolution. There's a 5Mp, 8x digital zoom camera on the back of each model, plus all the customary Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and HSPA 3G connectivity.
The one key difference between the Mini and Mini Pro: the latter has a slide-down Qwerty keyboard which bulks it out a bit. The Pro is 92 x 53 x18mm, 136g; the Mini 88 x 52 x 16mm, 94g.
Both will go on sale sometime between the start of July and the end of September. ®
COMMENTS
load your own
as previously reported, SE are releasing the boot loader key, so you can load your own updates :) Happy Days!
RIiight..
Like they said we could run linux on the PS3, innit?
Do you *trust* them after all this time?
In parallel universe
Imagine instead of wasting Symbian UIQ, Sony took it over and added Android VM to satisfy "It doesn't have 5000000 apps" idiots especially in tech media. Just add qt to it and suggest symbian devs use qt.
I feel glad for people who has never used UIQ on a decent hardware since it is easy to ditch Symbian when you have only seen S60 Nokias.
A Symbian UIQ3 on such hardware would last for a week in full charge.
Mini x10 pro
I have had one of these for the past few months and it's my favourite smart phone so far (had a nexus one as well as an iPhone 3g and 4)
It is the perfect size and is cheap enough not to worry about it scratching/breaking. The physical keyboard is a killer feature in such a small phone and the camera and sound-quality are well above average. It's a little slow sometimes and the battery life isn't great but I work in an office so don't really mind.
One niggle: the headphone/set socket is incompatible with apple style headsets.
Still, I'm pretty sure I'll be upgrading to the new one at the end of the year.
Welcome to the world
of modern smart phones, getting a full days use out of a phone is considered good ;) these days.
There are things you can do to improve the battery life, and 2.3 is supposed to have better power management, but agree 1 day from a charge isn't good :(
