Technknowledge

The Sony Ericsson Yari may miss the mark as the most innovative slider, but only if you don't look closer. Upon a second look, you will find that the Sony Ericsson Yari is a tiny little thing that's full of surprises.

The Yari has got a pretty decent 5 megapixel auto focus camera, but it's main focus point is another thing - gesture gaming. And we're not talking about accelerometer-based gesture recognition.

Thanks to an optical tracker technology developed by GestureTek, the Sony Ericsson Yari can use its camera to detect your movements and translate them into games moves. It can even do wireless multiplayer.

The technology has already been available to Japanese DoCoMo cellphones but it's only now that it's making its way to world-wide availability.

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Sony Ericsson Yari
Sony Ericsson Yari at a glance:

* General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100, GPRS/EDGE class 10, HSDPA 3.6Mbps
* Form factor: Slider
* Dimensions: 100 x 48 x 15.7 mm, 115 g
* Display: 2.4-inch 256K color TFT display, 240 x 320 pixel resolution
* Memory: 60MB integrated memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
* UI: Proprietary Flash-based UI
* Still camera: 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, geo-tagging, face detection, smile detection
* Video recording: QVGA video recording
* Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, GPS receiver with A-GPS support
* Misc: Gesture and motion-based gaming, Shake control, SensMe
* Battery: 1000 mAh battery

The Sony Ericsson Yari also has a built-in GPS receiver to deliver location-based services as accurately as they come.

Unfortunately, Wi-Fi support is not present on our Yari test unit despite the numerous videos presenting that in YouTube and such. As Sony Ericsson are not advertising the feature, we guess the retail unit won't be Wi-Fi capable as well.

You probably already know all there is to know about Sony Ericsson's upcoming HD-video-flaunting Kurara. Well, instead of posing for small-time opportunists, this time Kurara is starring in a real blockbuster shot and directed by no other but Mobile-Review's Eldar Murtazin.

Unannounced phones do get a lot attention but it's quite rare to see one star in a preview by a serious online media so long before its official announcement. Most of those pre-announcement meets are usually governed by some sort of non-disclosure rules (written or not). We guess Mr. Eldar Murtazin has been bitterly disappointed by Sony Ericsson - enough to break his own promises of not publishing any information harmful to the company (as mentioned here).

Anyways, it's back to the star of the show - Sony Ericsson Kurara. We've uploaded several preliminary specs in our rumor mill section so you can learn more about it even at this early stage. Kurara is a Symbian S60 5th edition smartphone, akin to the Sony Ericsson Satio. It does have the 8MP camera of its sibling, but the HD label on the back hints of even more. If you guessed 720p video recording, you're right.

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Sony Ericsson Kurara • Notice the 256MB RAM in the last screenshot

That would put the Kurara in direct competition to the Samsung i8910 OmniaHD. The 720p video recording club is about as elite as the 12MP club. Anyway, it's a nice sign of change for Sony Ericsson, whose phones are notorious for their low-resolution video recording.

Not to mention that the Kurara has a 3.5mm audio jack and a microUSB port. Now Sony Ericsson seem truly hard at joining the band of other manufacturers, which use standardized accessory ports.

But back to our news topic, you can find the Sony Ericsson Kurara preview here at mobile-review.com. It doesn't offer much information about the phone but there are plenty of photos, screenshots and camera samples, and of course a video sample (which is good 213MB large). And here's a spoiler for you: next time we see a leaked HD recording smartphone, we really would prefer some real world live action as a video sample instead a video capturing a YouTube video shot from a computer screen.

Only a week ago Carphone Warehouse pulled out the Satio from their stores due to software issues. Now the not-so-touchable Aino followed its Symbian sibling with complaints about touch performance.

Carphone Warehouse along with the Phones4U have withdrawn their remaining supplies of Sony Ericsson Aino. They are hoping Sony Ericsson will fix the bugs soon, otherwise the company’s holiday earnings are seriously threatened. That's the second Sony Ericsson phone causing issues lately and we can't quite remember the last time. It makes you wonder what's going on.

It seems that the affected Aino handsets are not that many and taking care of those won't be hard.

If news of the imminent Motorola Droid announcement wasn't exciting enough for Android fans, it looks like Sony Ericsson is set to make a similar claim.

Could it be?

Though the message on the Sony Ericsson website isn't Android specific, if there's any upcoming SE handsets capable of "crossing the line" between the extraordinary and the magical (cue eye-rolling) it would have to be the upcoming Xperia X3. We first saw leaks of the X3's interface back in July, followed by a leak on the website of online retailer Expansys. Details are still scarce, but rumours suggest that the X3 will run Android on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and if it's released after the Moto Droid then we assume it will run on version 2.0 of the Android OS — a powerful combination indeed.

Stay tuned for more details on 3 November, and cross your fingers this is in fact the X3 and not a new range of stereo headphones.

Like many other key mobile phones announced this year, the Xperia X10 had its rampant fair share of leaks. But the most telling was a conceptual user interface video on YouTube that showcased Sony Ericsson's custom software on the Android operating system. The Japanese-Swedish firm finally made things official this afternoon. Its first Android smartphone is the Xperia X10. The handset runs on Android 1.6 (codenamed Donut) and packs a 1GHz Snapdragon processor.

It took a while, but we're seeing more smartphones with 1GHz processors. At last count, there's the Toshiba TG01, HTC HD2, Acer neoTouch on Windows Mobile and the Acer Liquid on Android. While the speed of the chip is important, the overall user experience hinges on other things like memory and user interface as well.

To that, Sony Ericsson is introducing the Timescape and Mediascape applications with the X10. The former aggregates your communication history on multiple levels including, text messaging, email, Twitter and Facebook in one place. Mediascape does the same for your multimedia content. Going one step further, Sony Ericsson has built "intelligence" features into Timescape and Mediascape, which automatically congregate relevant content, contacts and media. Sure, that's a mouthful to digest, but going by the rather impressive leaked videos we've seen so far, all these do tally up. We get the feeling that Sony Ericsson may have done a good job with the UI experience here, but we'd reserve final judgment until we get to try it out.

The X10 has a 4-inch 854 x 480-pixel WVGA touchscreen. This is different from earlier Android smartphones with 320 x 480-pixel HVGA displays. The recently announced Motorola Milestone has a similar wide-aspect ratio LCD, but with a smaller diagonal size of 3.7 inches. According to Sony Ericsson, the panel on the X10 is also scratch-resistant.

Connectivity features are aplenty on the X10. These include a 3.5mm audio jack, Bluetooth stereo A2DP, Wi-Fi, Assisted-GPS, HSPA and quad-band GSM. It'll also support Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync out-of-the-box. This being an Android phone, it'll be preinstalled with Android Market, alongside Google Maps with Street View, Calendar, Gmail, Media Uploader, phone-top search, Google Talk and Google Voice Search. As for multimedia, there's an 8.1-megapixel camera with built-in photo and video light.

According to Sony Ericsson, the Xperia X10 is expected in Asia Pacific from Q1 2010. It will come in black and white. We'll have a proper hands-on evaluation once we get hold of a unit.