Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo -- take the blue pill with our hands-on photos

It's phone-mageddon in Barcelona right now -- with Mobile World Congress kicking off, major mobile manufacturers are unveiling their coolest, trendiest new mobiles. Sony Ericsson has already dropped the Xperia Play on us like some kind of almighty mobile mortar-strike, and now we're checking out the Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo -- an Android 2.3 mobile that packs an 8-megapixel camera and an HDMI output.

Click through our photos above to fill your peepers with glorious photos of the Neo in action, then when you're done be sure to check out our exhaustive Neo preview, which gives you all the detail you need on this new smart phone.

The Neo rocks a rather curious design, with curved back and rounded edges that actually make it feel a little chunky. It might not be the slimmest smart phone around, but we were impressed by how lightweight the Neo felt -- you could slip this bad boy into your pockets and forget it was there completely... in a good way.

That HDMI output squatting on top of the Neo is bound to come in handy -- it means you can export the Neo's sound and video to a hi-def telly with minimal fuss. That would be useful if you had some video on the phone that you wanted to play on a big screen, for instance.

The whole phone zipped along at a pleasing pace, thanks to the 1GHz Snapdragon processor on board. The whole interface felt really slick, which is definitely reassuring. The 3.7-inch screen looked bright and clear, though we were huddled in a darkened press conference, so how good that display looks when faced with direct sunlight remains to be seen.

The 8-megapixel camera is pretty interesting too, and Sony Ericsson reckons it'll handle low-light conditions really well. We're going to wait until we've got the Neo in our labs and under the CNET UK microscope before we confirm or deny that claim, but we're excited to see that this phone can do.