This is the almost certainly confirmed Sony Ericsson Xperia HD, one of the possibly three Sony Ericsson smartphones that’s scheduled to make their world debut at CES next week. As you can see, there is not much difference from the Nozomi device we saw earlier.
In terms of specs, it looks like the rumours are valid as well. The Xperia HD — as it would likely be called — features a 4.3-inch display with 1280×720 HD resolution. The 12MP camera is also present and you can expect it to be able to shoot 1080p HD videos. In addition to that, there’s a dual-core 1.5Ghz processor (a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8660 unit), 1GB of RAM and 8GB of on board storage. Unfortunately, the device does not have expandable memory. We believe the Xperia HD will not carry the “arc” monicker because its design does not feature a prominent arc that made the Xperia arc and arc S so distinctive.
Also unfortunate is that the Xperia HD runs on Android Gingerbread 2.3.7 rather than Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This is weird because Sony Ericsson said last year that all new phones released in 2012 will run ICS. Another way to look at this would be that Sony Ericsson wanted to be able to launch the device at CES and didn’t have enough time to develop a custom UI for ICS. If this is indeed the case, we assume that the Xperia HD will very likely get ICS soon after release.
With just a few days away from the unveiling of Sony Ericsson’s 2012 line-up, we’re pretty excited to see what the manufacturer has in store – though we can’t agree with the new design direction. The Xperia arc and ray are amongst some of the most aesthetically pleasing smartphones in the market today, it’s sad to see that Sony Ericsson didn’t continue this trend for 2012.
In any case, we will be at the heart of the action at a regional Sony Ericsson launch happening at the same time as CES in Shanghai. You know what to do.
