Announcing it’s arrival as their ‘flagship smartphone’, Sony have now confirmed the release of the Xperia S handset, their first foray into the mobile phone market since splitting with former partner Ericsson recently.

The Xperia S comes packed with a 1.5 GHz dual core, 1GB RAM, a fantastic 4.3-inch 720×1280 resolution reality display, NFC support and a 12 MP Exmor R camera. Sony have also confirmed that the Xperia S is to be their first handset release in their new ‘Xperia NXT series’ and will come preinstalled with the Android 2.3 operating system although, sources tell us that Ice Cream Sandwich should be coming to the Xperia S in Spring 2012.

There’s still a few hours until Sony present their press conference at CES 2012 in Las Vegas but, AT&T who have just held their press conference have announced several new phones coming to their network, including the Sony Xperia ION.

Firstly, from AT&T’s side this is the first Sony [Ericsson] Xperia phone to feature LTE technology in the US and will be exclusive to AT&T.

The annual CES event is taking place in Las Vegas this week. The trade show is running between January 10th and 13th but, Sony have a press event planned for today where new Xperia models are set to be announced.

The press event is due to start at 5pm GMT and you can watch the press event live from Sony’s website here. We’re expecting to see “something big” which is likely to come in the form on an Xperia Arc successor. Other Xperia models that are expected to be unveiled include an Xperia Neo successor as well as an Xperia Mini successor.

Sony Ericsson have confirmed that they will be updating all of their 2011 range of Xperia smartphones to Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The update will begin rolling out in March 2012 to the Xperia Arc S, Neo V and Ray initially.

The other 2011 handsets, such as the original Xperia Arc and Neo models, Xperia Play, Xperia Mini, Xperia Mini Pro, Xperia Pro, Xperia Active will get the update in late April to early May 2012. The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman will also be getting an update to ICS at the same time as the Xperia family.

We’ve seen many, many price drops for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, while the Xperia Arc and Arc S remained at a relatively high price. Until now that it. Carphone Warehouse have the Xperia Arc S available for £269.99 sim free, which is a good price but, another UK retailer is offering the handset for as low as £199.99.

A few months ago Sega announced that they would be releasing Sonic CD onto home consoles, the Xbox 360 and PS3. They also revealed that they would release the game onto the Android Market, along with iTunes at a later date. One thing that many queried at the time was whether the game would make use of Sony Ericsson Xperia Play’s gamepad. At the time, Sega said it wouldn’t at launch but, may get Xperia Play gamepad support in the future.