Sony Xperia E and E dual up for pre-order for Rs 9,999 and Rs 10,990

Sony may have reserved much of its spotlight for the Xperia Z & ZL launches in India recently, but the company has not ignored the mid-range and low-end segments.

The Japanese electronics giant is all set to launch two low-end models, the Xperia E and Xperia E dual, later this month. Both phones are on pre-order exclusively at online retailer Infibeam.

According to the pre-order page, the Sony Xperia E will be priced at Rs 10,490 and the E dual has a price tag of Rs 11,490. But the retailer is giving an early-bird discount of around 5 percent on each handset.

The E dual, as the name suggests, has dual-SIM capability, but the rest of the specs sheet is more or less the same for both phones.

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Both phones are up for pre-order now

Both have a 3.5-inch display with a 320 x 480 pixels resolution. That translates to a pixel density of 165 ppi. The SoC ticking inside the phones is Qualcomm MSM7227A Snapdragon with the single core clocked at 1GHz based on the older ARM Cortex-A5 cores. The Cortex-A5 is designed using the ARM v7 architecture and offers the advanced features of that particular architecture, including the ability to run the latest apps. Most apps nowadays are focussed and developed around the ARM v7 as support for earlier architectures has decreased. The CPU is coupled with 512 MB of RAM and Adreno 200 GPU.

Camera-wise, the Xperias E and E dual have a 3.2MP primary shooter on the back. Unfortunately, there’s no flash to help users in low-lit conditions. The front camera is a VGA unit and will be just about enough for basic video calling or checking your appearance. Internal storage is capped off at 4GB, but there is a microSD card slot on both handsets. Sony has loaded both devices with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, so performance should be decent while not exactly winning any benchmark awards.

Here is another look at some of the key specs of both devices:

• 3.5-inch TFT display with a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels
• 3G, HSPA, EDGE/GPRS
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot
• Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR
• 3.2 megapixel camera
• 4GB internal memory with support for microSD card

If you recall, Sony has also released a tool to install Mozilla’s Firefox OS on these phones. The OS is geared for low-end devices. The experimental build is available on the Sony website, but is said to be highly unstable and suitable only for developers. Users can try their hand at the new open source OS and flash back to original Sony firmware thanks to the tool.