This much awaited phone has been the talk of the town since
it was announced in Feb 2009. At the time of the
announcement Sony had predicted the launch of this phone in
the 2nd half of 2009; however, rumors suggest that it may
be on sale in Oct or Nov 2009. During a recent visit to a
press conference we got an opportunity to get a feel of
this phone. IDOU is just a prototype name for this model
which is still unnamed. 'Idou' in Japanese means 'a change'
and looks like this phone is going to change the way we
look at phones.

This phone comes with a 12 megapixel camera that is powered
by autofocus, a Xenon flash, LED flash for video recording,
Smile Shutter technology (it only captures an image when a
person is smiling, how cool is that!), geo-tagging and face
detection. It also has all the advanced features such as
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, A-GPS, microSD memory slot, USB 2.0
connectivity, touchscreen, HSDPA and an accelerometer, this
means that the phone detects the angle in which it's being
held and can change the screen to portrait or landscape
view. Sony Ericsson IDOU has a 3.5 inch touch screen that
occupies a large part of the phone. The touchscreen is very
responsive and easy to use. You can use the touchscreen
function on the display to access the camera and phonebook
via shortcuts; in addition, there are touch music player
controls on the display. You can also access the main menu;
the video player, messages, and the search option, there
are dedicated keys for each of these at the bottom of the
display.

On the right side of the phone are the volume rocker, media
player controls and a camera shutter. The left has a
headset jack/charger port. It's disappointing that the
phone has only one jack and Sony doesn't provide another
jack for the headphone. On the top of the display there is
a secondary camera which has been designed for video calls.
It is well placed and aided with a light sensor with
detects ambience lighting; this enables the camera to
adjust the brightness of the screen display depending on
the environment' s lighting condition.

As the IDOU has not been officially released, we are unable
to review it completely. If the software remains stable the
IDUO will definitely be a phone to have. At the moment Sony
is enjoying the anticipation in the market and is
heightening it by keeping mum. It hopes to be able to
reveal all soon including the official name of the IDOU
phone.