If you are over this side of the pond and looking to snap up the Sony Xperia U smartphone at some pont in the not too distant future, you just might like to know that if you happen to be in the United Kingdom, the Sony Xperia U has now gone up for pre-order with one UK retailer at least.

According to the guys over at Softpedia by way of Somobile, UK retailer Into Mobile Phones UK has now placed the Android packing Sony Xperia U handset up for pre-order, which will become available on O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and Three UK.

Apparently prices for the Sony Xperia U kicks off at £16.17 per month with a two-year commitment, although there are other numerous options available.

Spec wise the Sony Xperia U offers a 3.5-inch LED backlit LCD capacitive touch screen along with a 5 megapixel rear facing auto-focus camera with LED flash, 720p video, VGA front facing camera, a 1GHz dual core processor, 512MB RAM and 4GB internal memory and has interchangeable different coloured bottom caps.

On the down side, the Sony Xperia U doesn’t sport a microSD expansion slot, so hopefully that 4GB will be enough, and also will arrive running Android 2.3 Gingerbread rather than Android Ice Cream Sandwich, but the device is expected to be upgraded to Android 4.0 sometime in Q2.

So there you have it, you can now slap in your pre-order for the Sony Xperia U in the United Kingdom, will any of our UK readers be pre-ordering this Sony handset?