Sony Ericsson's Xperia Arc is a super thin Android smartphone that brings the company's Bravia Engine tech to the mobile device. In my opinion, its Sony's best phone yet.
Display
The phone features a 4.2-inch LED-backlit thin film transistor (TFT) touchscreen. While not as bright as an AMOLED display, it produces more accurate colours and is crystal clear, and quite beautiful to look at.
The screen utilises the company's Bravia Engine image processing technology that provides image optimisation in terms of colour and contrast, as well as noise reduction. This is apparent when using the YouTube app, as the video is sharp and smooth. This, to me, solidifies the device's positioning as a great multimedia and entertainment phone.
Look and feel
As I mentioned, the device is tall and thin, 125mm tall and 8.7mm thin, to be precise. It's slightly curved at the back, and its fairly large screen makes it slightly unwieldy in the hand. However, it's very elegant, almost effortlessly cool, and as the display sits so close to the surface of the glass, the edges appear almost invisible when the phone is off.
The battery life is as expected - a day for normal use, less if a lot of time is spent surfing the Web, watching videos or using any high-end applications.
In terms of the basics, the phone has five home screens to fill with widgets, apps and folders, with static shortcuts below to the most frequently used apps. What I found especially useful, were the large clock display, Google search bar and fast switches for turning on and off the backlight, WiFi and similar.
Hardware and apps
The user interface on the Arc is easy to use, smooth, and responds quickly to commands. Under the hood lies a single-core processor that runs at 1GHz, ensuring plenty of power for its needs.
This is clear from the general speed of the phone's interface, with hardly any pause or stutter in the various animations that appear when navigating the device.
Its camera was a huge plus for me. It has 8.1MP, records 720p high-definition video, and the hi-resolution 854 x 480 pixel touchscreen ensures excellent viewing. The camera has an excellent selection of settings, including face-detection and image-stabilisation.
I don't think I've ever seen a better phone camera. Even at night, with the LED light off, it took decent pictures. The dedicated photo button is also far easier to use than touch screen capture.
The Arc also features HDMI output, so that everything the user does on the phone, more than just pictures and videos, can be viewed on the TV too.
Once opened, the App Launcher features apps split up into pages, rather than a long list, which in my opinion, isn't too user friendly. The user can choose to file the apps in alphabetical order which I found useful, and most used, recently installed or custom arrangement of apps can be done by dragging the apps to the page chosen.
Software
The device runs Android version 2.3.2, and features a software addition called Timescape, a social network aggregation platform for Xperia devices. Timescape can gather all the user's Twitter and Facebook notifications, along with missed calls, e-mails and texts, and present in a graphic, easy to view, flowing format.
Sony Ericsson has definitely upped its game with the Xperia Arc. Its appealing shape and Android functionality puts it up there with the best of them. At a RRP of R4 999, it's a little pricey but as a high-end, multimedia device, it's superb.
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