Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro review: No small affair

Introduction

Sony Ericsson have always done a good job of putting big ideas in a small package. The original Xperia mini lineup wasn't ridiculously powerful but had plenty of personality. The pint-sized smartphones did well on the market and you can bet the successors are keen to build on their good start. The Xperia mini pro is under the lights today and ready to raise the bid.

We can imagine the Arc and the Xperia Pro calling this one junior. Not even a hint of condescension in that though. The Xperia mini pro has the same hardware as its bigger Xperia siblings, a fact that makes the level of miniaturization all the more impressive. There's room for a proper QWERTY keyboard at that. And there is a Reality display too, a solid battery and HD video recording. Android 2.3 Gingerbread is in charge.

A respectable list of features and we're only starting. There is so much more to explore. Before we go on though, let’s take a closer look at all the key facts and figures, and the potential deal breakers.

Key features

Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support

3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA

3" 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit LCD touchscreen, HVGA res (320 x 480), Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine

Full four-row, slide-out QWERTY keyboard

Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread

1 GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 chipset

512 MB RAM

5 MP autofocus camera, LED flash, geotagging

720p video @ 30fps, continuous autofocus

Front facing VGA camera, video calls

Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA

GPS with A-GPS

microSD slot (32GB supported, 2GB card included)

Accelerometer and proximity sensor

Standard 3.5 mm audio jack

Stereo FM radio with RDS

microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1

Voice dialing

Adobe Flash 10.3 support

Main disadvantages

No smart dialing

No DivX/XviD video support out of the box

Doubtful video recording quality

For such a small handset, the Xperia mini pro leaves no major feature out. Not a phone to put up with being looked down on. Not after meticulously upgrading everything there was to upgrade about the original Xperia X10 Mini pro.

Surely it can’t be the perfect smartphone - not even trying to impress with raw power. The Xperia mini pro is more likely to surprise you and slowly work its way into you.

Big box, standard kit

The Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro comes in quite a big box but the contents are nothing out of the usual. A microUSB cable, a charger and a standard single-piece handset is all you get. There are a few leaflets too, while the 2GB microSD card is already inserted in the phone.

Design and construction

The Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro has the look and feel of its Xperia X10 predecessor: a small, pocket-friendly messenger that offers a lot for its size and price. Some clever use of space and there's suddenly room for a 3" screen in what's virtually the same package.

We're having the pleasure of a white Xperia mini pro. It's entirely made of plastic: the battery cover has glossy finish that usually gets all smudged up in no time, but fingerprints are nearly invisible on the white paint. Those are inevitable on the screen of course.

There's little in the way of embellishments, which the white body seems to do well without. Two silver strips on both sides of the Xperia mini pro are the most conspicuous accents. The Home key up front and the QWERTY deck have the same trimming. The phone looks good in a simple, fresh way.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro has a 3” HVGA touchscreen – a scaled-down version of the so-called Reality display in the Arc and Neo. It's been scaled down both in size and resolution, but still a notable improvement from the original 2.55" QVGA display.

The capacitive screen has excellent sensitivity. The slightest of touches will do for user input to be registered.

The LED-backlit LCD unit is enhanced by Sony’s proprietary Bravia Mobile Engine. The display produces really nice colors, has decent contrast but the viewing angles are limited. There's considerable loss of color when viewing at an angle. What we were impressed with is the excellent sunlight legibility.

Above the display, we find a status LED, the earpiece, the proximity and the ambient light sensors plus the video-call camera. The proximity sensor disables the display during calls.

Below the display is the usual trio of hardware controls. The difference to the last year's model is the Menu and Back keys are capacitive, with a single hardware control in the Home key. Quite surprisingly, the new Xperia mini pro has managed to both increase screen size and get better controls. The Home button has good press, while the capacitive controls are well-defined, nicely backlit and haptic enabled. All are very comfortable to use.

There's both manual and auto display brightness setting and the ambient light sensor is doing a good job of adjusting to the available lighting.

Fast Gingerbread is fast

Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and Sony Ericsson have integrated it with the Timescape UI to make their products distinguishable. The mini pro inherits the four-corner homescreen interface introduced with the previous generation minis, but Sony Ericsson has done some improvements on it.

We are big fans of the Sony Ericsson's Overview mode on the homescreen - you pinch to zoom out on any of the 5 homescreen panes and a new pane sets in with a cool transition effect to display all of your active widgets. If there is not enough space for all the widgets - they start floating on the screen overlapping.

The four-corner UI aside, the rest of the interface is pretty much similar with what we saw in Arc, Neo and Play, although shrunk to fit on the HVGA resolution. Here is a video demonstrating the user interface.

The Overview mode is has some similarities with HTC’s Leap view or what Samsung have on the Galaxy S. However widgets are not ordered in mini screens so you cannot see what’s on each of them. Widgets are shuffled instead so they can better use the space. They are as big as possible and thus easier to press.

Now let's talk about the four small docks on each corner of the homescreen. They can host up to four shortcuts easily assignable with a drag-and-drop gesture. If a dock hosts a single shortcut (just the dialer for example), it is launched automatically when you tap on it. If there is more than one shortcut - the dock expands so you can make your choice properly. You can't put folders here.Creating folders on the homescreen is nice and simple, the way it’s done on the iPhone. You drag an icon over another and a pop-up appears, prompting you to select a name and layout for the new folder.

Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro supports both static and live wallpapers. There are 15 static wallpapers and a single (Maps) live one, but you could always get more from the Market or assign a picture from your personal gallery.

The new Sony Ericsson app called LiveWare is preinstalled on the Xperia mini pro. It lets you set the behavior of your handset when paired with an accessory. You can have an app launch automatically when headset, headphones or a charger is connected. You can, for example make the mini pro start the music player each time you plug-in your headphones or go to picture frame mode each time you connect a charger.

As far as general performance is concerned the Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro does splendidly - no lags, no freezes or hiccups, no problems whatsoever. It uses a Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset featuring a 1 GHz Scorpion CPU and the Adreno 205 GPU - the same as the Xperia Neo, Arc, Pro and PLAY. But it's even faster because of the lower HVGA resolution. You can see for yourself from the benchmarks below.

The Xperia mini pro offers theme options too but the implementation is pretty simple - a theme only changes your wallpaper that you see on the homescreen and the system menus. On a better note, if you like Sony Ericsson's wave theme but you are tired of watching it in blue, now you can have it in a lot more colors.

A better Timescape UI

The Timescape brings all your communications together: an aggregate view of your SMS, MMS, email, call log, Facebook and Twitter updates. Timescape has a tabbed structure, allowing you to filter the contents by type and get all relevant information in one place.

The Timescape app • The Timescape widget

With Timescape you can not only see the latest activities and updates from your contacts but also share your own status, reply to received messages or call back if you have a missed call.

The best part of the new Timescape is you can set it as a widget on you homescreen. It will show all of your updates as tiles. You no longer need to sacrifice all your homescreen estate.

If all these functions are not enough for you, there are free Timescape plugins in the Android Market for the Sony Ericsson users. Currently, you can update your Timescape with mixi, Foursquare, Orkut, Gmail, Music and Photo extensions. The first three are similar to the other social services, while the last three show your latest emails, played songs and viewed pictures.

The Android Market you'll visit the most, but you have PlayNow too

The structure of the Android Market is quite simple – featured apps on top and three buttons (Applications, Games and My apps). There is also a shortcut up there for initiating a search.The Applications and Games sections are divided into subsections (e.g. Communication, Entertainment etc.) so you can filter the apps that are relevant to you. Of course, there is also an option of displaying them all in bulk, but you’ll probably need days to browse them all that way. There are all kinds of apps in the Android market and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.).

Sony Ericsson's own store called PlayNow is also on board. There you can get a lot of free things for your phone - wallpapers, some games and apps or even music tracks.

Final words

We're impressed with the Xperia mini pro, and can't hide it. Having tested many of the recent Sony Ericsson smartphones, we have to admit the difference between old and new Xperia has never been so sharp. Keeping it all so neat and compact while nearly putting the specs through the roof is a remarkable achievement.

Sony Ericsson have managed to squeeze an Arc's engine in the Xperia mini pro. The Reality display is here too, never mind it's a smaller HVGA unit. The real deal though is the proper QWERTY keyboard.

The Xperia mini pro runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Thanks to the lower screen resolution, the mini pro is as fast as possible - you can see that in the benchmarks and our demo video. The whole UI is fluid and responsive, there are no lags, nothing to annoy even the most demanding users.

The one thing missing, that you get with the Arc and the Neo, is the Exmor R camera sensor. There had to be something missing, right? We still think though that the 5 megapixel stills and HD video are more than enough in a handset that puts compact size first.

The Xperia mini pro is probably in a game that's virtually free of competition. It's hard to match the features and keep the price within limits. Keeping it that compact is harder still. We still have a few handsets in mind, in case you are willing to consider something different - for the most part it would mean settling for less.

To get the obvious out of the way, the Sony Ericsson txt pro is half the price of an Xperia mini pro. It's obviously not a smartphone but does the basic social integration, has all the needed connectivity and a QWERTY keyboard. It is basically the size of our guest of honor - the Xperia mini pro. It sounds like a deal if you don’t need the complications of a smartphone.

Although a different form factor, the HTC ChaCha is an option to consider if QWERTY is a must. The ChaCha runs on Android Gingerbread too, but has room for a much smaller and less impressive display. Deep Facebook integration is a key feature, and users are welcomed by HTC Sense and the light and compact metallic body. It costs about as much as the Xperia mini pro.

Maybe you would, or maybe you wouldn't. The Xperia mini pro should be looking forward to a bright future not only for its upgrade value. Compact phones may have little impact on a market moving steadily towards massive screens and tablets. But compact is a good way to make a difference. There are few phones that try. Fewer still do better than the Sony Ericsson Xperia mini pro.

Modern-Techie : Technology Hub

Wednesday 24 August 2011