Quality sub 3-inch Android based smartphones are becoming rarer partly because of manufacturer's fixation on large display touchscreen devices.

This may explain why the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini is being discounted at Handtec, where it is currently on sale for £105 (white version, unlocked) and is set to be replaced by the bigger Xperia U.

The handset was released last year and comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 SoC clocked at 1GHz (that's the same model as the Xperia Play and arc amongst others).

In addition, it packs a small 320 by 480 pixels 3-inch touchscreen display, 512MB RAM, Android 2.3 Gingerbread (with Timescape UI), a microSD card slot (with a 2GB card), a five megapixel camera with flash and HD video recording capabilities, a microUSB port, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, DLNA and a FM radio.

Like its bigger brothers, it comes with a Reality Display with Sony's own Mobile BRAVIA engine which apparently makes the screen sharper and crisper.

The phone costs almost 40 per cent more at other online retailers; the only other small form factor handset available for a similar outlay is the HTC Explorer which comes with a slower processor.