Sony Ericsson’s local Xperia lineup will get expanded next week with the release of the Xperia Ray, joining the existing Play, Neo and Arc models. Next cab off the rank for Xperia down under? Potentially the Mini Pro.
Exclusive Android deals are an annoying fact we all have to deal with if we want contract phones. Vodafone has the Australian exclusive on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray, which goes on sale from September 28.
Kmart is full of cheap Android phones right now. As well as the $79 Motorola Flipout we mentioned last week, there’s also a $99 deal on a Telstra-locked Xperia Mini X10 Pro. That same deal appeared at JB Hi-Fi earlier in the year; it’s a bit more than the Flipout, but you do get Android 2.1 and a more conventional form factor. [Kmart via OzBargain]
When Sony Ericsson released the Xperia Play earlier this year, it said that the long delays seen with rolling out Android updates seen with the X10 were a thing of the past and that it would ensure new models carried the most current version. It appears to be sticking with that resolution, with the soon-to-be-launched Xperia neo shipping with Android 2.3.3.
We’ve seen brand new sub-$100 Android phones from Telstra, Optus and Crazy John’s, so it was only a matter of time before that price point also hit older Android models. JB Hi-Fi is selling the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro for $99 outright as a prepaid handset.
While the general availability date for the Xperia Play is June 8, Telstra has announced it will have limited stock in its own stores from June 3. More notable than that: the outright buy price of $960.
We got to play with PlayStation-controller-equipped, Android-toting Xperia Play quite a while ago, but local release details for the phone were sketchy at the time. Now we have a launch date — June 8 — for two networks: Optus and Telstra. What about Vodafone?
In my review of the Xperia Play last week, I mentioned that Mark from our sibling gaming site Kotaku was not at all keen on the device. Given that the Xperia Play represents a relatively rare moment when the subject matter for Kotaku and Lifehacker collide, we figured it was worth going head-to-head to discuss the merits of what happens when an Android phone meets a Sony controller. Here’s what went down.
Sony Ericsson has copped a fair bit of flak in the past for not making Android updates for its phones readily available, but the company says it will work harder on that for the future. Indeed, over the weekend it announced an update to Android 2.3 for the X10, despite earlier claiming that technical issues would make that impossible.
