Since Sony announced that they were buying Ericsson out of their joint-venture on the mobile side of things it was nice to think that we might see those Sony letter branded into our next smartphone. So far however, the smartphones released solely by Sony haven’t been all that impressive and in the States things are looking a little lacklustre with the Xperia S even shipping with Gingerbread at the beginning of the year when HTC were readying a trio of Ice Cream Sandwich devices.
It looks like Sony are looking to round out the end of the year with more devices, earlier in the week we brought you info of Sony inviting press to an event in Berlin before IFA kicks off proper. Mobile-Review have managed to get their hands on what’s assumed to be one of the new devices that Sony are looking to unveil, dubbed the LT30p “Mint” it looks to be a little bit of a departure from earlier designs from Sony. The device also looks to become the company’s new flagship, judging by the specs inside. With a dual-core Snapdragon S4 clocked at 1.5Ghz, a 4.7″ HD display, a 13MP camera capable of full 1080p recording as well as a 720p front-facing camera. On the storage side of things there’s 16GB onboard and space for a microSD, for connectivity there’s NFC as well as MHL. There’s no word yet on LTE support but, if Sony are looking to release this in the States, it’d be a good idea, no?
Aside from the hardware Sony are looking to innovate on software by bringing a feature called “small apps” that will allow certain widgets to overlay whatever else on the screen such as the calculator seen below. This is similar to what Samsung ship with Touchwiz on tablets allowing quick access to apps whenever they’re needed as well as the picture-in-picture feature on the GSIII. As well as these features the phone looks set to ship with support for software buttons first introduced on the Galaxy Nexus.
We’ll be bringing you more on Sony’s latest devices when we have it, let us know whether or not you’re holding out on some decent Sony hardware?
[Source & Images: Mobile-Review]