Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Review 1
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini is adorably tiny, but promises to be packed withsmart-phone features, thanks to its Android operating system. Its 3-inch touchscreen also means this compact phone looks thoroughly usable.
The Mini will arrive in shops this autumn. We don't know how much it will cost yet but, based on the tiny price of its predecessor, the Xperia X10 Mini, we expect it to be cheaper than average.
Mini by name...
The Mini has a slightly larger case than last year's X10 Mini. It measures 52 by 88 by 16mm, which means there's room for a 3-inch screen. The screen is half an inch bigger than that of the X10 Mini, and the same size as the one on the larger Xperia X8. The upshot is that the Mini feels like a tiny phone, but has enough screen real estate to be very usable.
The 320x480-pixel display also uses Bravia video-smoothing technology, named after Sony's line of televisions. In our early hands-on tests, video looked very impressive on the Mini's screen, especially given it's such a tiny phone.
That's good news when it comes to watching the 720p high-definition videos that you can shoot on the Mini's camera. The camera also offers a 5-megapixel resolution for still photos. Stay tuned for our full review to see how the Mini's camera stacks up.
Tiny robot
The Mini may be small but, inside, it's a fully-fledged smart phone. Email, maps and more are all present and correct. Sony Ericsson tells us the phone will launch with the latest version of Android, 2.3 Gingerbread.
Sony Ericsson has customised the user interface to suit the small screen. We thought the changes were worthwhile on the original X10 Mini, but Sony Ericsson has toned down its tweaks for the new Mini, which is a move we agree with, since it has a larger screen. You now get a full Qwerty keyboard in portrait mode, rather than an alphanumeric one, and there's room for multiple Android widgets on each home screen, instead of just one.
There are also shortcut menus that sit in the corners of the screen. In each corner, you can add up to four shortcuts to your favourite apps. The corner menus pleased us on the previous Mini, but we'll have to take the new Mini for a full test drive before we agree that it's still a good idea on the larger screen.
The Mini has a few custom apps, like the Timescape app, which shows an animated stream of your Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Thankfully, Sony Ericsson has resisted making too many changes to Android, and most of its tweaks can be ignored if you don't like them -- for example, the Timescape app. But you are stuck with the dark blue and black colour scheme that Sony Ericsson has imposed on all the menus.
On such a small phone, usability is everything, so we're happy to see that the Mini has a large, finger-friendly home button, flanked by touch-sensitive menu and back buttons.
Shrunken Snapdragon
We haven't had a chance to push the Mini to its limit yet, but, during our brief tests, it felt smooth and responsive. We're not too surprised, since there's a muscular single-core 1GHz Snapdragon processor inside. That should provide plenty of oomph for playing games and apps downloaded from the Android Market.
The Mini also has room for a microSD card, so you can store your photos and apps. You'll probably get a 2GB card in the box, and you could bump that up to a maximum of 32GB.
Outlook
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini could be tempting if you're considering upgrading to a smart phone, but don't want one of the massive, sun-blocking slabs that are all the rage at the moment. Its screen is surprisingly spacious, given the phone's amazingly small case, and it even shoots HD video. If it turns out to be as usable as we expect, it could be a winner.
Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Review 2
Sony Ericsson didn't have the best of years in 2010, but one of the few bright spots was the launch of theXperia 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 (320x480) 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.
Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Review 3
Building on the original XPERIA X10 Mini, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Mini is a fully featured smartphone in an incredibly tiny package. The XPERIA Mini is a comprehensive upgrade, especially under the hood. It will be powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, up from the 600MHz processor of its predecessor; it will come with 320MB of internal memory, up from 128MB; it will record 720p HD video, up from standard definition video recording. Sony Ericsson claims the XPERIA Mini is the world's smallest Android smartphone that records HD video.
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Mini also comes equipped a larger 3in display compared to the XPERIA X10 Mini (up from 2.5in) and has a higher resolution of 320x480 (up from 240x320). Like the flagship XPERIA Arc, the XPERIA Mini uses a "Reality display" combined with what Sony Ericsson calls its BRAVIA Mobile Engine. It claims image noise reduction, along with sharpness, colour and contrast enhancements when viewing images and video.
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Mini runs the latest 2.3 Gingerbread version of Google's Android platform. Gingerbread offers a revamped keyboard, better copy and paste functionality, improved power management, and a slicker user interface as improvements over previous versions of Android.
The XPERIA Mini also comes with a Sony Ericsson custom UI overlay that takes advantage of the smaller screen size compared to most phones on the market. Users can place up to 16 apps in the corners of the XPERIA Mini's home screen and can add widgets to individual home screens like regular Android smartphones. The XPERIA Mini is also one of the first Sony Ericsson smartphones that will ship with 'Facebook inside XPERIA', software that integrates Facebook into commonly used areas of the phone including the picture gallery, music player, phonebook and calendar. The Facebook inside XPERIA feature will soon be available across other Sony Ericsson XPERIA handsets through a future software update.
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