With all the smartphones being announced over at Mobile World Congress at the moment, we’re kind of salivating with anticipation about which handsets will end up in Australia on which network. We’ve just had our first announcement, with Telstra confirming that the Xperia Neo from Sony Ericsson will land on Next G, with a three-month exclusivity window.
The phone is promised to be available in the “first half” of 2011, which is a pretty large window for launch. But given that the HTC Desire – which was announced at MWC last year – launched in April, we wouldn’t hold it against you for expecting a similar launch window for the Xperia Neo.
In terms of specs, the Neo looks pretty good:
· Exmor R™. Great still photos and videos even in low light
· Reality display with Mobile BRAVIA® Engine which reduces image noise, increases sharpness and enhances contrast
· Built-in HDMI. Display still photos and videos on an HD TV
· More than 100,000 apps on Android Market
· Google™ services including Google Mail™, Google™ search, YouTube™, Google Calendar™ and Google Maps™
· Size: 116 x 57 x 13 mm
· Weight: 126 grams
· Operating system: Google™ Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)
· Processor: 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon™ MSM8255
The HTC Desire was one of my favourite phones of last year, and I’ve got high hopes that Telstra’s decision to launch this as their flagship Android handset for the first half of the year means we can expect similar things from the Neo.