Hands on: Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini review
Posted by | Posted in Smartphones News | Posted on 07-05-2011
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Sony Ericsson didn’t have the best of years in 2010, but one of the few bright spots was the launch of the Xperia X10 Mini and its keyboarded sidekick, the Mini Pro.
So it makes perfect sense that Sony Ericsson would choose to reboot the mini marvels this year, and it’s done so to great effect.
The Xperia Mini is essentially packed into the same size chassis as its predecessor, but with a three inch screen rather than the 2.55-inch version. The pixel count has been boosted to HVGA (320×480) which means it can now run a much higher percentage of applications from the Android Market.
The increase in resolution really shows too – while we were big fans of the previous phone, the screen’s sharpness was a little on the dull side. The Xperia Mini looked bright and crisp, further boosted in media terms thanks to the addition of the Bravia Engine.
The latter feature is supposed to improve video playback on the device, and it certainly did look clear and crisp – but the size of the screen means that it’s never going to be your primary media player.
The chassis feels more premium too, with the front home button slightly segregated from the rest of the front… running your finger over it gives a solid feel, with a strong pressing action and easy holding in the hand.
The main thing that really impressed us though was the sheer snappiness of the phone, with the 1GHz Scorpion processor powering through all tasks with veritable aplomb. Given we’ve been playing with the Samsung Galaxy S2 this week, it didn’t feel dissimilar to the snappiness of the Xperia Mini.
The interesting thing about the Xperia Mini and Mini Pro is the placement of ports – well, interesting if you’re into that aspect of a phone. The Xperia Mini has the headphone port at the bottom, along with the USB slot, with the power/lock key at the top.
The Mini Pro has all three on the top of the phone – whether the few millimetres difference in thickness between the phones makes a difference, we don’t know. But it may make the phone feel a little weird when holding it to watch videos etc, so we’ll have to check that out in our full Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini review.
The Xperia Mini also sheds the front facing camera of its keyboarded brother – again, we’re not sure whether it’s a size thing or people with keyboards love to look at themselves.
The back camera’s been boosted to a 5MP offering with 720p video recording with the lovely addition of an LED light for flashing and suchlike. A few quick pics we took showed that the performance was passable – we’ll need to give it a good going over to really see if it’s just a handy addition or a decent snapper.
We were big fans of the TimeScape overlay for the original X10 Mini and that’s back in full force on the Xperia Mini. The smaller screen means Sony Ericsson had to condense it’s media and social networking overlay down, and it managed this by clever corner icons to your favourite applications.
The new addition here is the ability to have a few icons in on place – tap it and it opens out to let you select whichever one you want, or slide in the direction of the application and it will ping it open. It’s a clever system and within easy reach for your digits, and thanks to the improved processor it zips along under your finger.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc was the first phone we saw with the improved Android overlay from Sony Ericsson, and one cool feature from that was the ‘exploded widgets’ view, accessed by pinching in on the screen. This allowed you to see all the important parts of the phone, but needed a big screen to work correctly.
To get past the size limitations on the Xperia Mini, Sony Ericsson has made all the widgets float around each other, jostling for position in a cool animation. It’s another fun feature, and it’s good to see Sony Ericsson focusing on such interactions for the user.
The keyboard was also surprisingly accurate in normal use – we were able to tap out whole sentences off the bat with minimal mistakes. You do need a little more focus as the screen is so much smaller, but given most will have happily made that sacrifice in buying the phone, it won’t be a problem.
The internet browser seemed oddly slow on the device we were using, with the TechRadar site actually taking longer to load than on the previous iteration. However, this is likely down to some slightly shonky Wi-Fi at the venue rather than the phone itself so we’ll reserve judgement until our full Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini review.
What was good to see is the buttons on offer in the browser menu (and throughout the phone) were nice and easy to hit – it would very easy to have them too small on a screen this size, but Sony Ericsson has kept everything nicely within limits.
The last thing we’ll touch on is the Facebook integration – the brand is making a big deal about how much deeper it’s managed to shove the social networking aspect into the phone, and while it does work, we’re not sure about all the features.
The media side of things seems like it won’t be used by a lot of people, being able to like songs from your phone, Spotify or YouTube. This means the ‘like’ will be posted to your main Facebook feed and will probably annoy most of your friends rather than encourage music discovery. However, we like the ability to look at what people are checking out on YouTube – an easy way to catch up on the latest memes.
The Facebook photo integration is cool though – like on HTC Sense, your (and friends’) photos from Facebook are available from the phone itself without diving into a seperate application, and even with the slightly wonky connection the photos still streamed quickly and in a slick manner, with the ability to like and comment on them directly from the handset.
Overall, we’re very impressed with the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini handset – we were fans already and the new redesign with Android 2.3 at the heart is another feather in the cap of the brand that’s desperately trying to gain some critical success.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini release date has been set for Q3 in the UK, so we’re looking forward to getting our hands on the review units in the near future… so keep your eyes peeled for a big review of a teeny phone.
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