Freshly announced at MWC 2011 earlier this week, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Neo promises to be the mid-range Android smartphone with some serious imaging punch. We grabbed some hands on time today with the exclusive red variant headed to Vodafone – as well as the regular blue model – and it’s a slick, if a little plastic, handset.

The XPERIA Neo firmware wasn’t final, so we’ll hold off from making any judgement calls on how the smartphone performs (or, indeed, how the camera holds up), but from what we’ve seen it’s shaping up nicely. Sony Ericsson has made the sensible decision to separate out its Mediascape and Timescape apps from the core OS, which means that – in theory, at least – Android software updates should come through in a more timely manner than for previous XPERIAs from the company.

Of the three colors – white, blue and red – we have to say we prefer the red; in the plastic it’s rich, slightly metallic, and looks a lot more interesting than the somewhat mundane blue version. The silver edge pieces are discrete, and the Neo fits nicely into the hand. We’ll have to wait for review units to drop before we know whether the phone shapes up as a whole, however.