Sony Ericsson XPERIA Mini Android phone (preview)

Not content with its XPERIA Arc, XPERIA Play and XPERIA Neo Android phones, Sony Ericsson has moved to strengthen its low-end Android line-up with the XPERIA mini, a successor to the XPERIA X10 Mini.

Read our comprehensive Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini review, and check out our guide to the best upcoming smartphones in 2011.

Building on the original XPERIA X10 Mini, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Mini is a fully featured smartphone in an incredibly tiny package. The XPERIA Mini is a comprehensive upgrade, especially under the hood. It will be powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, up from the 600MHz processor of its predecessor; it will come with 320MB of internal memory, up from 128MB; it will record 720p HD video, up from standard definition video recording. Sony Ericsson claims the XPERIA Mini is the world's smallest Android smartphone that records HD video.

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Mini also comes equipped a larger 3in display compared to the XPERIA X10 Mini (up from 2.5in) and has a higher resolution of 320x480 (up from 240x320). Like the flagship XPERIA Arc, the XPERIA Mini uses a "Reality display" combined with what Sony Ericsson calls its BRAVIA Mobile Engine. It claims image noise reduction, along with sharpness, colour and contrast enhancements when viewing images and video.

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Mini runs the latest 2.3 Gingerbread version of Google's Android platform. Gingerbread offers a revamped keyboard, better copy and paste functionality, improved power management, and a slicker user interface as improvements over previous versions of Android.

The XPERIA Mini also comes with a Sony Ericsson custom UI overlay that takes advantage of the smaller screen size compared to most phones on the market. Users can place up to 16 apps in the corners of the XPERIA Mini's home screen and can add widgets to individual home screens like regular Android smartphones. The XPERIA Mini is also one of the first Sony Ericsson smartphones that will ship with 'Facebook inside XPERIA', software that integrates Facebook into commonly used areas of the phone including the picture gallery, music player, phonebook and calendar. The Facebook inside XPERIA feature will soon be available across other Sony Ericsson XPERIA handsets through a future software update.

Sony Ericsson is yet to announce Australian pricing or availability for the XPERIA Mini, but it will be available globally in "selected markets" from July.

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