Sony makes Xperia SL official

If you're thrilled by Sony's Xperia S, then you have another reason to get excited. The company has just revealed plans for an Xperia SL phone, which sees the Xperia S and raises its 1.5GHz CPU up a notch to 1.7GHz. Of course, both phone's processors are last-generation Snapdragon S3 chips, which while technically dual-core, are roundly trounced performance-wise by Qualcomm's current Snapdragon S4 processors.

The Xperia SL, however, will come in two additional colors (silver and pink) compared with the Xperia S's stock hues of black and white. Another improvement is that Sony expects to infuse the Xperia SL with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich right out of the box. By comparison, the Xperia S runs the older Android 2.3 Gingerbread, though is upgradable to ICS via PC download.

Still, even a 1.7GHz Snapdragon S3 chip likely won't improve the Xperia S much. Either operating with Gingerbread or ICS, I found the Xperia S a slow and sluggish handset. Qualcomm must be charging an arm and a leg for its modern S4 products for Sony to not include them in its current 2012 product line. Either that or someone Sony-side made some spectacularly bad project management calls.