Xperia Play and XPeria Arc pre-order for free on contact from Vodaphone

British hand held gamers rejoice! Vodaphone is offering pre-order of the
Sony-Ericsson Xperia Play for FREE with contract. Users who sign up before April first will also receive a free deckstand and six preloaded games (Crash Bandicoot, Fifa 10, Star Battalion, Tetris, Sims 3, Bruce Lee). In addition to the Xperia Play, users who just want a basic Android experience can also preorder the Xperia Arc for free on contract as well.

As outlined here on AC, The Xperia Play is Sony’s first PlayStation certified phone. It has Qualcomm’s optimized Snapdragon processor with a 1GHz CPU and embedded Adreno GPU graphics processor. Other specs include a 4″ TFT screen with Sony’s proprietary Bravia display engine, slide up gaming controls, 5 MP rear facing camera, and it comes with six Playstation One games preloaded out of the box. It will also take advantage of the Tegra Game Network thanks to it’s Playstation Suite of up to 60 games being released over the next year.

The Xperia Arc has a similar 4.2-inch capacitive touchscreen with Reality Display and Mobile Bravia Engine. It’ll be powered by a 1 Ghz processor. It has dual cameras including an 8.1 MP rear facing and front facing Webcam. The 8.1MP is loaded as it can record 720p HD video at 30 frames per second and has Sony’s remarkable Face Tracking utility. Both phones will run Android 2.3 Gingerbread out of the box.

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Droid 3 Photos leaked, shows redesigned keyboard

Photos have leaked of what is reported to be the new Motorola Droid 3 sporting a redesigned keyboard. The slide up QWERTY has five rows, rather than the smaller 4 row design featured in the Droid 2. The buttons look fairly large for typing and it’s an impressive outlay considering the phone shown looks fairly thin. There also looks to be HDMI and microUSB ports as well.

But other than that, there isn’t really much to go on. It looks to have a stock 4″ TFT screen, and if were can infer anything from the previous Droid 2 specs and the current state of the Android art, we can probably expect top maybe go up to a qHD screen. And since the Droid 2 runs a Froyo flavored OS, it would certainly need to run Android 2.4 (Gingerbread) at the very least.

Other possible specs to dream about …. maybe maybe boosting to dual core for that 1Ghz processor? Replacing the 5MP camera for a a 8MP camera with full HD recording? Or jump on the dual camera bandwagon? That doesn’t seem likely since the images don’t really show a front facing webcam for video chat. At the very least we’d also expect 4G/LTE connectivity. What would you like so see?

• [via Unwired View]

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