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In the case of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini Pro, you have both.  Unveiled at the recently concluded Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,  the new X10 Mini Pro also comes with a touchscreen Mini which is a more direct miniaturization of the now-delayed XPERIA X10 touchscreen announced last November 2009.

There’s definitely a market for small handsets with the features of their bigger siblings in the upscale markets and we hope the Minis fall in line with a more affordable price points way lower that the rumored €600 for the Xperia X10 which at this time is already overpriced.  With an older OS and slightly better than mediocre specs, a €600 price point for the Mini Pro could even be overpriced.

X10  Features Shrunk

First, let’s have a look at what the Mini Pro shares in common with the X10.  It’s is a dual band 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA and a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G.  You get the same WiFi 82.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and A2DP, microUSB 2,0 and microSD support for up to 32GB of external memory.  There’s a built-in A-GPS, stereo FM receiver with RDS, Bluetooth A2DP and 3.5mm headphone jack for either wireless or wired headset listening.

The Mini Pro uses the same Android 1.6 OS “Cupcake” with the Rachel/UX user interface.   There’s Timescape that combines all your messaging, calling and SNS communications in one screen and Mediascape that does the same for all your media content apps and content.  Other than these, here are the features common with the X10 that Sony watered-down on the Mini versions.

You now have a Qualcomm MSM7227 clocked at 600 MHz instead of the 1 GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon used in the X10
Imaging resolution goes from 8 megapixels to a 5 megapixels. You get no image stabilization and touchfocus features. Video recording details are not announced but you sill get LED flash, autofocus, geo tagging and video light.
It sports a mere 2.55-inch display, down from the X10′s glorious 4-inch Wide-VGA display, though you now get 16 million colors against the 64k colors on the X10. It’s a resistive touchscreen and comes with a gravity accelerometer and scratch resistant surface.
Phone memory almost disappears from a generous 1GB to just 128 MB in the Mini Pro but you still have microSD expandability of up to 16 GB.

Conclusion

Unless you have tiny fingers or that of a child, the tactile QWERTY keyboard may take time getting used to at such a small size as in the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini Pro.  It’s a good thing the virtual QWERTY keypad on the screen had not been taken out as you could go faster using the stylus keying in the data.

We figure this could be the world’s smallest sliding QWERTY smartphone when it comes out this April.  And we hope it does. Knowing Sony’s track record, this could be released in the summer.  Remember the Satio announced in February of 2009 and released in October?   Remember the Xperia X2 announced in September of 2008 and released in January 2009?  The X10 should be on track with a November 2009 announcement and should arrive in March 2010.

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini Pro went live at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and we had a chance to put hands-on the hardware. It’s like a shrunken-down XPERIA X10, just like its spiritual sibling, the XPERIA X10 Mini. The X10 Mini Pro, has a slide-out keyboard, which is the only real difference between the two.