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Photographs of the Sony Ericsson ST18i, codenamed ‘Urushi’, have leaked online. We first saw blurry spy shots of a couple of Xperia handsets last month, but someone with a steadier hand has managed to sneak out 11 pictures and send them to GSM Arena.
The name itself has caused a little confusion. We’d originally had it down as the ‘Asuza’ (or possibly the ‘Azusa’) but reports suggest that the ST18i (or ST18a) is actually called the ‘Urushi’. Whichever it is, let’s have a closer look.
This Android Gingerbread phone is a tinier version of the Xperia Arc. It makes do with a single-core 1GHz Snapdragon processor, suggesting this will be a mid-range rather than top-end smart phone. It has a decent enough 3.2-inch touchscreen with 480×854-pixel resolution, while we’re reliably informed that the rear camera is an 8-megapixel affair with 720p HD video recording.
The handset, tastefully adorning a bright orange “new products” backdrop, has even been photographed side-by-side with an iPhone 4. Naturally, it’s obligatory to compare every smart phone to an iPhone and it’s something we’ll be demanding from purveyors of spy shots in the future.
There are several jaunty shots of rather obscure internal specifications, so if you’re really keen on knowing about OpenGL and CPU variants, go knock yourselves out. The rest of us may be content to know it’s rumoured to be available in September, when no doubt it’ll have a more pronounceable name.
We decided to attempt some extreme geekery, so we poked about in the screenshots to find some tidbits. First up, we thought it was vaguely interesting that the dashboard icon is identical to that used in Mac OS X. Secondly, the ‘Mogami’ hardware may well have been named after two early 20th century Japanese imperial naval cruisers, themselves named after the Mogami river. See, we know about non-gadget stuff too (and how to look it up on Wikipedia).
These aren’t the first shots of unofficial Sony Ericsson handsets to leak out, but they’re certainly some of the best. For a start, they’re nearly all in focus, unlike the blurry Cyber-shot prototype we saw last month. If we knew who’d snapped these shots, we’d hire them.
