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Sony’s crafted a brand-new Android smart phone capable of surviving an accidental dive into your pint. The Xperia Go is a 3.5-inch, dust-fighting rugged phone that Sony reckons is ideal for outdoorsy types.
Whether you’re scaling Everest or drunkenly stumbling into a lamppost while texting, the Xperia Go has been built to resist life’s untoward elements. You get a scratch-resistant screen, and what Sony calls the “highest water and dust resistance of any smart phone”.
That means that like the Motorola Defy, the 9.8mm-thick Xperia Go should avoid shattering into a million pieces if you so much as look at it the wrong way. Its resistance rating is IP67, which means it offers total dust ingress protection, and is okay with water immersion between 15cm and 1m depth.
The rough-and-ready build is the selling point here, as apart from doubling as a dog’s chew-toy, the specifications on offer are rather modest. The 3.5-inch display has a resolution of just 320×480 pixels, meaning it won’t be the best phone out there for web browsing, while the camera boasts a strictly ordinary 5-megapixel resolution.
The Xperia Go is powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor, which isn’t particularly snappy in these quad-core times, while the Go will launch running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Sony swears it’s ‘upgradeable’ to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but that’s no guarantee that an update will be incoming any time soon.
There’s no word yet on when the Xperia Go will actually be released, but it’s confirmed to be flaunting a range of colours, coming in black, white or yellow. As far as pricing goes, nothing has been confirmed, but with modest specs, I wouldn’t expect this mid-range mobile to break the bank.
Sony has also unveiled a higher-spec water-fighting smart phone, the Sony Xperia Acro S. But Sony tells me that particular phone won’t be coming out in the UK.
Would you like a sturdier smart phone? Let me know in the comments or on our Facebook wall, then relax with this daft promo video for the Xperia Go, which sees young professional types being clumsy with the phone while cooking a healthy meal.
