Sony's Xperia Ear personal assistant earpiece is available for pre-order in Europe

Sony has started taking pre-orders for its Xperia Ear personal assistant earpiece in parts of Europe, for shipping sometime in mid-November. It was first announced as a concept device way back in February at the 2016 Mobile World Congress trade show, but Sony later decided to make it a full-fledged product.

The earpiece links up to a companion smartphone app and is supposed to allow the owner to issue spoken commands to their phone, similar to Google Now, Siri or Cortana. Owners can use it to make phone calls, perform internet searches and more with the included microphone. Conversely, the Xperia Ear has its own voice features to help read out texts to users, along with messages from apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

Sony is taking pre-orders for the Xperia Ear exclusively, for now at least, on the company’s own store sites in a number of countries. UK buyers can pre-order the earpiece for £179 while other European countries like France and Spain can order it for €199. People who do pre-order the earpiece will also get a code that offers a discount on any Sony Xperia phone. The voucher will be for £45 in the UK and €50 in the rest of Europe. There’s no word on when, or if, the Xperia Ear will be launched in other markets, including the US.

If you live in the parts of the world where it will be sold, will you be pre-ordering the Sony Xperia Ear?