Sony Xperia Pro Review

So I got my first chance to review a new phone the other day.  A Sony Xperia Pro.

This is a really good phone, however it is not a ‘top end’ in terms of a power house, but definitely no slouch either.  This is something I’d recommend to that business BB user who wants to make the switch to Android.

Here’s my chance to give it a review.  As I couldn’t find a good screenshot app that didn’t need rooting [didn’t want to root a phone that wasn’t mine], I did it as a youtube clip.  Just so you know, I hate being on camera, so go easy on the comments about my voice etc…

So here it is:

Here’s how I broke it down (for those who don’t want to sit through 10 minutes of my nasally voice):

Physical Stats

Well, here’s a breakdown of what this phone has:

In the video you’ll see me compare it to my phone, and my wife’s phone.  It’s in between, it’s funny how it doesn’t LOOK like much different, but you do feel the difference if you’ve had something larger.  The pixel resolution is decent, and on a smaller screen like that it makes it feel pretty ‘dense’… like when you used to think that 19″ screens looked better than a same resolution 32″.

It also has a dedicated camera button, notification light, a light by the hard buttons (but no search button – and no ‘hold menu to search’ option either) as well as mini HDMI, headphone jack, microUSB connector and it comes with an 8GB microSD card.

I think it’s these buttons that make it ideal for business users.  It’s somewhat ‘comforting’ to have actual physical buttons again, however after having not had them they’re considered novelty, and not really practical.

Operating System

You’ll see from above it says 2.3, but if you look it’s 2.3.3 inside.  Unfortunate as 2.3.4 has the enabling for the front camera in Talk.  So without that update you can’t use it there, but you can use it for other apps that call for the camera.

Now Sony is updating its current lineup and most are seeing 2.3.4, so we’ll see if this phone gets that update.

Sony’s launcher, has a really nice feel.  The widgets are very animated, and the Timescape feature is really cool.  What’s especially nice is seeing that there are plenty of plugins available for TS.  Often some manufacturer makes a skin and then leaves the option to develop to others, and it’s not picked up well, so it’s like webOS with a tiny app market.  However, there are a lot of options for TS.

Having only 320 storage to play around with felt pretty snug, and that’s why I didn’t tie it up to my personal account and flood it with apps, I wasn’t sure how much 320 is anymore.  Sure doesn’t sound like a lot.  I know you can store apps on the card, but it comes with 8, and if I installed everything, and then changed my card… there’d be a little chaos for sure.

Power

As you see, it comes with a 1GHz processor with 512MB RAM.  Decent.  It’s what my phone had a year ago, so it sounds slower, but it handles it quite well.  My phone felt a little sluggish after using this.

The widgets are very responsive [see video].  And I love all the extra eye candy that it can provide.

Now it could also be that I really didn’t stress test the unit.  My phone has almost 80 installed apps, a separate launcher, several keyboards, 9 screens and dozens of widgets.  So hard to compare apples to apples.

The battery wasn’t that bad and handled itself quite well.  It comes with a 1.5Ah battery (again, same as my phone does), and I was surprised how well it handled a charge when not in use.  Again, I probably didn’t really stress test it as I could have tho’

Screens & Camera

First, it hard to adjust to only 5 home screens – so the first thing I’d recommend is put a new launcher on this thing.  Now, will a launcher kill the ability to use Timescape?  I hope not, as I kinda liked it.

The screen was really bright, and made my old phone look ‘blue’ in comparison.  Only issue was that there was no sensor that I could tell, or option to set the phone to an ‘auto’ setting, as the display is the biggest killer of batteries yet.

When you view images in the gallery Sony has put in a “Mobile Bravia Engine” great for viewing.  On my old phone, looking at pics in the gallery has never shown how ‘sharp’ the picture actually is.  Well on this phone you get that.  It’s really good.

The camera is pretty good as well.  Here’s some samples:

However, the LED flash is harsh on us humans.  I kept blinding myself, and it really reflected off anything especially brightly.

The camera app is missing some features from standard gingerbread, kinda bare bones – especially as I couldn’t find a ‘menu’ options to play around with.  One neat feature is the ‘smile’ timer feature.  It’ll hold and wait on a face until they smile, then it captures the picture.  Novel!

Physical features

I’ve discussed some of the neat things things about the phone thus far, and all good stuff.  But physically the phone’s lacking something aesthetically in my point of view.  It’s a little bulky and oddly laid out.  It fits the hand perfectly, but the placement of the keys is odd.

For one thing the camera button – now I know it’s for putting it in landscape mode, and then it’s in the proper spot, but I just can’t seem to get it.  I try to do everything on the phone one handed, and that would mean trying to get the camera button with my pinky on the far corner; and so far it’s been hit or miss whether it’s doing it or not properly.

The biggest ‘mishap’ for me is the keyboard.  The phone’s biggest selling point and I found it hard to use.  To open the phone up (again, with one hand) was not easy, as I’d often end up sliding my thumb across the screen.

The other ‘failure’ in the keyboard was suggesting corrections in spelling.  When I make an error [and I do a lot when I type – so I rely heavily on the wavy red line to tell me when I’m wrong] it would stay highlighted on the misspelled word, and not the suggested corrected word.  You would have to recognize that it’s wrong, cursor over to the right one, then use the spacebar to accept.  I’d assume that a simple mistake it would highlight the appropriate suggestion instead.

Also, I found the keyboard to be too… square, as it wasn’t inherently laid out like a regular keyboard, and I found it hard to find the right keys.  Maybe I’m still new to using a keyboard — it’s been some time — but even the f/j key ‘nubs’ you could barely feel.

Those features make the keyboard a non-function.  I’d say go for the equivalent Sony phone without the keyboard and have a skinnier phone… unless you do a lot of typing with the phone (which I don’t).

Overall

$0 for 3 years?  Cheap like borscht.

Which makes it great for that Blackberry user who wants to make the Android jump.  You get a lot of the ‘business features’ out of a phone (keyboard, notification light) as well as the freedom of using an Android OS.  I showed it to several people who have blackberries now and each said it was very nice (except those with torches… to them it seemed about the same, but they even said having the widgets was pretty cool).

So, watch the video to see it in action.  I apologize if it’s of poor quality, I didn’t really know how to get it to show off phone screens as well as I should have.  I’ll just have to get more phones and keep doing!

Thanks to the Sony gang for letting me take it for a spin!