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Sony Xperia T James Bond Skyfall version exclusive to O2

A James Bond version of Sony's flagship Xperia T is coming exclusively on O2, bringing a 4.6-inch screen, dual-core chip and MI5 extras.

Andrew Lanxon Editor At Large, Lead Photographer, Europe
Andrew is CNET's go-to guy for product coverage and lead photographer for Europe. When not testing the latest phones, he can normally be found with his camera in hand, behind his drums or eating his stash of home-cooked food. Sometimes all at once.
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Andrew Lanxon
2 min read

Sony's Bond-endorsed Xperia T smart phone is speeding its way to our shops, but for the truly dedicated secret agents, O2 is offering exclusive Bond extras for you to enjoy while sipping a Martini in your Monte Carlo penthouse.

The Xperia T replaces the Xperia S as Sony's flagship smart phone. Its 4.6-inch screen offers a resolution of 720x1,280-pixels, which is the same on the Xperia S. The S's screen was one of our favourite things about the phone, offering rich colours and sharp text, and in our early hands-on test, the T's screen gave a similarly pleasing experience.

For the secret agent wannabes among you, there are a few Bond treats pre-loaded onto the Xperia T when you buy it through O2. The swag includes photos from the upcoming Skyfall film, which have apparently been geo-tagged so you can pinpoint their location on a map to go and see the film locations for yourself. Bond ringtones and screensavers are included too, but although they're hardly likely to impress 007 himself, it might just keep your Bond appetite at bay until Skyfall comes out on 26 October.

The Xperia T will be available without the extra Bond treats through the other networks or via Phones 4U, which is offering a free Sony SmartWatch to boot. The watch links over Bluetooth to your phone to let you check messages and see who's calling without taking your phone out -- which seems much more Bond-like than a special ringtone.

Inside the Xperia T is a dual-core 1.5GHz processor. That's not as powerful as the quad-core chip found in the Galaxy S3, for example, but bear in mind most apps aren't optimised to run with quad-core processors, so you can usually get at least as good performance from two cores, without the extra battery drain. We haven't been able to run our tests on it yet, but fingers crossed it delivers.

More disappointing is that it's running on the older Android Ice Cream Sandwich, rather than the more up to date Jelly Bean. That's a shame, especially as this is Sony's flagship phone. Sony reckons that it'll see an update to Jelly Bean, but it previously hasn't been great at pushing out updates, so I'm not holding my breath.

Phones 4U is offering the phone for free on £28.50 per month on Orange, which gets you 600 minutes, 3,000 texts and 1GB of data, or through O2 for £36 per month, with unlimited minutes and texts and 1GB of data. O2 hasn't revealed any information about pricing the Bond package, but it'll no doubt give a full run down in due course.

What do you make of the Xperia T? Do you fancy being Bond or would you prefer to be Batman? Leave an encoded message in the comments below, or go spy on our Facebook page.