Sony has today revealed the Xperia Sola, a new 3.7-inch Android smartphone similar to the Xperia P and Xperia U, which were unveiled a couple of months ago. If you've been following the rumors over the past few months, you'll recognize this as the MT27i "Pepper".
The Xperia Sola is packing a brand new technology called "floating touch", which allows the screen to sense when there's a finger hovering over it. The main use case highlighted by the manufacturer is web browsing -- on the Xperia Sola, users will be able hold their finger over a web page like a cursor, before touching the screen to select. It's an interesting concept, but we'll have to spend some time with the device before we're completely sold on it.
The Xperia Sola also sports a different profile to most of Sony's other 2012 smartphones. There's no clear element near the bottom of the device, and the screen protrudes from the base, likely due to whatever extra tech Sony's crammed in behind it to facilitate that "floating touch" feature.
Internally, the Xperia Sola closely matches the Xperia P -- there's a 1GHz dual-core ST-Ericsson chip inside, a 3.7-inch "Reality Display", and all of Sony's usual software stuff on top of Android 2.3 Gingerbread (an update to ICS is promised for "Summer 2012"). You also get NFC support, which lets you use Sony's "SmartTags" to automate certain tasks when they're in range.
The Xperia Solai will launch globally in black, white and red during the second quarter of the year. We've got today's full press release, alongside some introductory videos, after the jump.
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