Sony’s new Android phone, the Xperia SP, has a disco-flavoured coloured light strip and it’s partying it up right now on Orange and T-Mobile for £250 pay as you go.
The SP’s more fun than your usual dowdy mid-range blower, with a see-through strip underneath the screen that glows different colours. It’s part notification light, part glitter ball — it’ll flash however you want when you get a text, or pulse with disco passion to the beat of your music.
Until we get our hands on it for a full review we won’t know if that’s tremendously naff or wonderfully gaudy (or perhaps both), but it’s glorious to see a bit of camp in a phone.
The Xperia SP’s other specs are pretty classy though — its 4.6-inch, 1,280×720-pixel screen has a nearly retina-class density of 319 pixels per inch. A respectable 1.7GHz dual-core chip powers the reasonably recent Android 4.1 Jelly Bean software. And an 8-megapixel camera packs in Sony’s Exmor RS imaging gubbins. It’s even got 4G.
We recently got wind of a new Xperia feature on the SP — the ability to link up with a standard PlayStation 3 controller so you can play Android games without covering up most of the screen with your hands.
The Xperia SP isn’t exclusive to Orange and T-Mo. As it’s packing 4G, EE is offering it for free from £26 per month, but to get the most of its high-speed mobile Internet, you’ll probably need at least 3GB of data every month, and that’ll set you back a whopping £46.
If you want it SIM-free, Carphone Warehouse will flog it to you for a hefty £380. Phones 4U will do you a deal for a free phone from £25 per month on Vodafone, but with a meagre 250MB of data.
What do you think? Will you take the Xperia SP for a turn around the dance floor? Dance like nobody’s watching in the comments, or on our flamboyant Facebook page.