Sony Xperia Odin C650X captured in the wild

A few days back it was reported that Sony’s next flagship handset would be called Odin. This has changed to a fairly large extent as GSMArena has obtained an image of the Sony Xperia Odin C650X via a Japanese website.

From the images we can see that the device features a large, almost edge to edge display, and the Xperia logo below it. From the looks of it, the Odin will feature a metallic body. Commenting on this handset, the report by GSMArena states, “The rest of the handset's alleged specifications include quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset and 2GB of RAM. Rumor has it that the Sony Xperia C650X Odin will likely break cover during CES 2013 in Las Vegas this coming January. Such on occurrence makes quite a bit of sense as we saw the Sony Xperia S and Xperia ion go official during the same industry event this year.”

The upcoming flagship phone from Sony makes its first appearance

An earlier report stated that Sony is preparing a C650X smartphone under the code name of Odin. The report went on to state, “As detected in its User-Agent Profile (UAProf), the phone looks to run Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean and Sony's 10.1.A.0.XXX firmware. To be clear, there is no other evidence to support the claim of "flagship" device. Considering we're talking about early 2013, the idea of anything older than 4.1 would be met with a collective grumbling by the Android masses. Yet, if Sony is able to build on the momentum of recent models (Xperia T), then the Odin could be mythical indeed.”

If the report by the Japanese website is accurate, then we may expect Sony to launch three new handsets with model numbers - C6502, C6503 and C6506. However, it could be that these are model numbers of variants of the same handset.

Two entry level models are expected in 2013 by Sony. These handsets feature -- C1505 and C1604/ C1605 -- are believed to come with HVGA displays of sizes yet unknown, and will run on Android v4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

In an earlier report by GSMArena, the mobile related website shares some information on these entry level handsets by stating that the C160X is powered by a Snapdragon S4 Play chipset, with a single 1GHz Cortex-A5 core and Adreno 200 graphics as revealed by its NenaMark 2 results. The C150X is probably powered by the same platform, though there are no benchmark results for this one.

The two entry level handsets are expected to be similar to the Xperia tipo. Here is a quick look at some of the features of the Sony Xperia tipo:

• 3.2-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels
• 3G, EDGE/GPRS, HSDPA, HSUPA, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi hotspot
• GPS with A-GPS
• Bluetooth version 2.1 with A2DP
• 3.15 megapixel camera
• 2.9GB internal storage expandable up to 32GB via microSD

The tipo was recently launched in India, and is directed at the youth segment in the country, and hence is media and social networking-friendly. The Sony Xperia tipo is priced at Rs 9,999.