I wanted a new phone and after having the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro I knew one thing. My next phone would have to be a Sony Ericsson Xperia. I realy like the whole touchscreen vibe but I don’t like typing on the touch screen all the time. I don’t mind “touch typing” sometimes, but for sending emails and for writing its so much easier to use a slide out qwerty ketboard.
So when I looked online to see what Xperia’s are available with a big screen and a slide out qwerty keyboard, I found the Xperia Pro. At the time when I got, I was told that it is discontinued and I then did some research and bought it online. It took so long to arrive but when it finally did (after a month) I new this phone would be awesome.
My previous phone was black and i wanted something brighter so I decided to take the silver version. The options were black, red and silver. Various websites said that black and red show fingerprints so this helped me make my tough decision.
I am the kind of person that loves keeping their tech devices in perfect condition. So after realising that any pouch or case will add bulk to the phone and ruin its thinness, i found a company in America called Skimoni and bougth one of thier silver carbon fibre techskins from their amazon store. It came to about R200. It is basically a carbon sticker that id made for the phone and you carefull stick it on. The funny thing is that it didn’tarrive so Skimoni sent me another one. And then both arrived so I have a spare in my cupboard in case I need to replace it, but by looking at the quality, I don’t think I need a spare. If you would like to see what Skimoni product I have used, click here or click here for the main site.
Now back to the phone itself! It has a 3.7 inches LED-backlit LCD, capacitive touchscreen which means you get a nice sized screen, I think even bigger than the much loved Iphone. It also has a Sony Mobile Bravia Engine which means the screen quality is pixel perfect. The phone is only 142 grams and is really light and is 120 x 57 x 13.5 mm even though it has a slide out qwerty keyboard. I have used a screen protector that came with my Skimoni skin because I don’t want it to get scratched but it does have a Scratch-resistant glass screen which I am sure works, I hope I never find out. If you are a music lover, you can plug your normal 3.5mm heaphones in to jam while on the go. It takes a microSD, up to 32GB and comes with an 8 GB card. When I ordered my phone I chose to buy the 32GB microSD card ( Was roughly R320, what a deal) so that I have a lot of space for movies, music, pictures,apps and other files.
The phone supports up to HSDPA which means that the internet is super fast but can get expensive. Once my ADSL was down, and I used the HSDPA and it used like R40 in about 20 minutes. It has Wifi which I always use wherever I can!
I don’t own a digital camera because I know that whenever I would need it to take pictures I would never have it with me. For this reason I chose the Xperia Pro because it has a 8 MP, 3264×2448 pixels, autofocus, LED flash camera. If you would like to check out some pictures that I took with it,click here for the pictures of Camps Bay or click here for the pictures of the stranded ship on Clifton If you looked at the pictures, which I hope you did as they are awesome, you would have noticed that the camera quality is amazing. It has got a front facing camera for video calling but it is only VGA so you won’t catch me taking pictures with it.
For videos, it has a  720p HD camera with 30fps, continuous autofocus and a video light. I filmed something for 6 minutes and the video size came to 271 MBs. So you can see that the video camera is so good that whatever it films is going to take up a lot of space, maybe that’s why you should get the 32GB card. So if you want to film short movies, the camera is good enough.
The phone comes loaded with Android OS, v2.3 (Gingerbread) but soon we will be able to upgrade to the latest version of Android, 4.0 ( Ice Cream Sandwich). It features the well known chipset Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon with a 1 GHz Scorpion Processor and Adreno 205 GPU. It also has 512mb of RAM which means the phone is quick and smooth.
For messaging there is SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, IM, Push Email. Unlike Apple who do not support Adobe Flash ( so stupid), the Xperia pro supports Adobe Flash aswell as HTML for browsing.
It has an HDMI port so you can hook it up to your TV to watch movies, look at pictures or even see your phone on the tv. It supports MP4/H.264/WMV player and MP3/WMA/WAV/eAAC+ player. It also has the well known Sony Ericsson app calledTrackID so you can easily identify a son that is playing on the radio. A usefull app that it comes with is Office Suit Pro. This is the full version and allows you to open word, excel and PowerPoint files, edit them as well as create new ones.
Battery wise the phone features a Li-Po 1500 mAh which provides:
| Stand-by | Up to 430 h (2G) / Up to 400 h (3G) |
| Talk time | Up to 6 h 55 min (2G) / Up to 7 h (3G) |
| Music play | Up to 31 h |
This is good for a smart phone. I normally land up charging the phone at night so that I have a fully powered phone for the next day but it could easily last for two days.
My suggesting: Don’t get a blackberry, they are crap and they keep breaking. Get a Sony Ericsson, you know you are getting quality.
Pictures courtesy of gsmarena.com
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