Sony Ericsson Announces Android-based Xperia X10 Mini & Mini Pro

Sony Ericsson has presented two new mid-range mobile phones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the Xperia X10 Mini and the X10 Mini Pro.

As this has been the case quite often with Sony Ericsson (and some other manufacturers), these phones are merely variants of other models, all of them yet to be formally available in the UK.

Both run Android 1.6 (the latest version of Android is 2.1), are almost square in format and come with a 2.55-inch QVGA touchscreen display compared to a 4-inch model on their bigger brother.

The X10 Mini is a smaller version of the mammoth sized X10. The X10 Mini Pro adds a slide out keyboard while bumping the thickness by a mere 2mm. There's also a 5-megapixel camera, a downgrade from the 8-megapixel on the X10.

The rest of the specification list is pretty mundane; social networking features, 3.5-mm headphone jack, microUSB, microSD, aGPS, HSDPA and WiFi.

The X10 Mini weighs only 88g while the keyboard-equiped X10 Mini Pro tips the scale at 120g. No release dates or pricing details have been announced yet.

Arguably, launching the Mini reminds us of another mini, the N97 Mini from Nokia which, like the X10, packed almost the same specifications as its bigger sibling but ended up as an inbetweener.