PlayStation-Certified Sony Xperia S Breaks Cover

Not content to pull back the curtains on just one handset today, news of Sony’s new Xperia S handset has started to make round ahead of Sony’s big Las Vegas press conference.

Gone is the “Ericsson” moniker, but the Sony handset is nothing to sneeze at. The Xperia S packs a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor (what is it with 1.5GHz processors today?), a 12-megapixel camera capable of recording in 1080p, and an NFC chip. It’s slated to be available in both black and silver when it launches, and while I’m a fan of bright orange, I imagine most people won’t have an issue with the color scheme.

Sadly, for a phone that’s supposedly launching in Q1 2012, it only runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, though we know Sony is already working on Ice Cream Sandwich updates for most of their more modern handsets.

The gamers among you will be interested to know that the Xperia S is also PlayStation-certified, so it’s fully compatible with the PlayStation Suite and all of the nifty games that it affords access to. Users will have to be pretty judicious with which games they install though — it will only come with 16 or 32 GB of storage depending on the model they choose.