Sony announces Xperia sola smartphone with "floating touch" technology

Sony Xperia sola

Sony has taken the wraps off of the sola, the latest smartphone in its Xperia line. From the outside, the Xperia sola appears to be your run-of-the-mill slab-style Android smartphone, but Sony was able to pack some new technology into the touchscreen that is designed to make it easier to navigate the web.
This new technology is called "floating touch," and it allows a user to hover their finger over the display to move what is akin to an invisible mouse cursor and then merely tap the screen once the desired link is highlighted. The sola is the first smartphone to use this new tech, but Sony says that it plans to bring it to other models in the future. The screen itself is a 3.7-inch, Reality Display powered by Sony's Mobile Bravia Engine with 854 x 480 pixels of resolution.

The sola is powered by a dual-core, 1GHz processor and it includes support for NFC, DLNA, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. There is a 5 megapixel rear camera with 720p HD video recording,
though the sola appears to lack a front-facing camera. The phone measures 116mm x 59mm x 9.9mm (4.56in x 2.32in x 0.39in) and weighs 107g (3.77oz). Sony says that it will get about 5 hours of talk time or just under 20 days of standby with its included 1,320mAh battery.
The Xperia sola will run Android 2.3 Gingerbread with Sony's custom user interface when it launches. Sony says that an upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is in the works for a summer 2012 release.
Sony plans to offer the Xperia sola in black, red, and white color options, and will launch it globally in Q2 of this year. Pricing information has yet to be announced. For a closer look, check out the videos below that show of the Xperia sola's new floating touch technology.

It runs Android 2.2, but it can be updated to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. It supports an LTE 4G connection through Verizon. It has a 5 megapixel camera, which is nothing special in and of itself. But it stands out in the fact that it can record 720p HD video. Now that’s quite an accomplishment for a phone like that.

It has 16GB internal memory storage, but this can be expanded with microSD cards. The 1.3 megapixel front camera can be used for video calling. The 4.3” touch screen display makes it one of the biggest display phones out there, right on par with the Galaxy S2 and the Sensation.

It runs a 1GHz Snapdragon MSM8655 processor. That means no dual core. And this is why LG’s Revolution smartphone doesn’t quite make it into the high end category. Everybody knows dual cores have smoother interface responses.