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Time for a ray of sunshine from Sony. The Sony Xperia Sola is a new Android smart phone with clever NFC tags — and you don’t even need to touch it.
The Sola is the first phone to show off a new Sony feature called floating touch. Floating touch lets you surf the web without touching the screen — simply hold your finger over a link, hovering just above the face of the phone, and the link will be highlighted and clicked without your finger making contact.
That’s handy for keeping the 3.7-inch screen clean of unsightly smears and fingermarks. Great — I can keep surfing the web while scarfing a KFC Bargain Bucket, without having to bust out a moist towelette after every thigh.
The Sola also comes with Xperia Smart Tags. Smart Tags are little chips that talk to your phone via NFC. Each tag can be set to give your phone up to 10 specific instructions when phone and tag are near each other.
Keep a tag at work and your phone will automatically go into silent mode, fire up your email and loyally show a company logo as your wallpaper when you sit down at your desk. Place a tag in your car, and you can divert your calls to voicemail and fire up the sat-nav simply by placing your phone on the dashboard. Natasha found it pretty limited on the Xperia S, but this video shows how it works:
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Sony Xperia S with NFC tags hands-on
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Inside is a 1GHz dual-core processor, 8GB of memory, and a 5-megapixel camera that also shoots 720p high-definition video. Taking a leaf out of Apple’s book, Sony isn’t making a noise about the screen resolution when you can just give it a fancy name instead — so the Sola sports a Reality Display with Mobile Bravia engine. The actual resolution is 480×854 pixels, which gives a pretty good pixel density of 265ppi (the Galaxy Nexus, to compare, has over 300).
One thing that’s missing is Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android. The Sola arrives with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, upgradeable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich at a later date.
The Sola flares in black, white and red. It rises some time in spring — keep it CNET for UK release dates and a full review nearer the time.
Does the sun shine out of the Sola, or is it eclipsed by the competition? Bring me sunshine in your comment or on our Facebook page.
