Sony Xperia S Goes Official at Vodafone Australia

Australian carrier Vodafone has just announced the immediate availability of Sony’s flagship smartphone, the Xperia S. The smartphone can be purchased both online and in-store starting today and April 24, respectively.

The carrier will offer the Xperia S in white, on Vodafone’s new $49 AUD Plan over 24 months (total min cost $1176 AUD), including $550 AUD of value for standard national and international calls, text and more.

More importantly, those who grab the Sony Xperia S on one of Vodafone’s plans and are not happy with it can bring the phone back within the first 30 days and only pay for what they’ve used until the cancellation goes through.

As expected, Sony Xperia S is shipped with Android 2.3 Gingerbread out of the box, but the handset maker already confirmed it would deploy an upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich sometime in mid-year.

The phone is powered by a dual-core Qualcomm MSM8260 Snapdragon processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, which is complemented by an Adreno 220 GPU and 1GB of RAM. It comes with 32GB of internal memory, but lacks microSD card slot for memory expansion.

Another strong point of the Xperia S is the 12-megapixel rear camera that features autofocus, LED flash and full HD (1080p) video recording. There’s also a secondary 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls.

Last but not least, Sony Xperia S boasts a hyper-vibrant LED backlit LCD capacitive touchscreen with HD (720 x 1280 pixels) resolution, which is based on Sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine technology.

“Sony has hit the ground running with its first smartphone. The Xperia S impresses on many levels. With the powerhouse of Sony technology at its core, customers will no doubt enjoy its raw power and extraordinary media features,” said Ross Parker, general manager of Devices and Pricing at Vodafone.