Gizmodo notes the release of Minola’s Dimage Xt:
Steve’s Digicams on Minolta’s update of the Dimage Xi, the Dimage Xt. The Xt is slightly smaller and lighter than the Xi, but has the same resolution (3.2 megapixels) and the same 3x optical zoom lens.
Actually, the zoom lens is still 3x zoom, but under the hood it’s slightly different. Both cameras have 9 elements in 8 groups, but the Xi (older model) has 5 aspheric elements while the Xt (newer model) only has 3.
I don’t know if this will translate into a visible difference in quality, but I would assume that more aspherical elements would be preferable to less.
Also note that the previous version sometimes had light falloff on the corners, I don’t know about the new one though