This week the mobile industry is in Barcelona, Spain for its annual trade show – the Mobile World Congress. It’s a massive event. If you can imagine a sea of 50,000 people packed into exhibition space spanning two city blocks then you can get a sense of the scale.

In between the back-to-back meetings with technology vendors, we get to do some fun things like announce new products. And overnight we joined with Sony Ericsson to let our customers know that we’re bringing a new Telstra-exclusive smartphone to Australia that’s big on multimedia features.

Called the Sony Ericsson Xperia™ neo, it combines the latest Android 2.3 operating system, a powerful 1GHz processor and impressive multimedia features you’d expect from Sony products.

For instance, it incorporates picture technology previously reserved for Sony BRAVIA TVs. Sony call this technology Mobile BRAVIA Engine and it works to reduce image noise, increase sharpness, manage colour and enhance picture contrast – just like on a big screen TV. This means people will be able enjoy bright, sharp images on neo’s 3.7-inch screen.

Xperia neo also borrows technology found in Sony’s Cybershot family of camera products. For example, its 8 megapixel camera uses sensor technology that captures better pictures in low-light conditions. There’s also an HD video recorder built in.

And for our many customers who like to share what they’ve captured there’s HDMI and DNLA connectivity making it easy to send pictures and video from the phone to a TV screen.

Pricing and availability will be announced closer to the launch date. In the meantime let us know what you think of the neo.