British phone retailers have begun making the new Sony Xperia S smartphone available for pre-order. The phone is scheduled for a March 5 release date in the UK. Those who want to pre-order one can get it for as little as £21.50 per month. That price comes from the O2 network, and only gets a very basic service plan – 100 minutes, 500 texts, and 500MB of data – but it also nets them a phone that is expected to retail for over £400 contract free.

Release date and pricing information for the Sony (not Sony Ericsson) Xperia S in the U.S. are sparse at this point. A first quarter U.S. launch is likely, but there appears to be little real data. The Xperia S sports a 4.3-inch HD display, 1-1.5 GB of internal memory, 1 GB of RAM, and runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, with the possibility of an upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich at some point after launch.

The British site BuyMobilePhones has a complete rundown of pre-order and plan pricing for the Xperia S.