SlashGear

The Android race is hotting up, with another leaked live image of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X3 showing there’s plenty of room in the market for a big-screen slab of megapixel-toting smartphone.  Yet another handset tipped to use Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon chipset – as found in the recently announced Acer Liquid A1 and expected to make an appearance in the rumored HTC Dragon – the XPERIA X3 will also pack an 8-megapixel autofocus camera.

Up front there’s a 4-inch 852 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, while under the hood lurks both dualband HSPA, WiFi b/g and GPS.  Full specifications for the handset were previewed by a prematurely posted Expansys product listing, though right now there’s nothing approaching official confirmation from Sony Ericsson themselves.

What’s not on show from this snapshot is the distinctive UI that Sony Ericsson are tipped to have included on the smartphone, back when we knew it under the codename “Rachel”.  That UI – which you can see in a leaked video demo after the cut – is expected to replace the standard Android interface perhaps even more fully than HTC Sense does on the HTC Hero.  The XPERIA X3 is expected to arrive on the market in January 2010.

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