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> Free loan phoneIt's been a busy old year for Sony Ericsson. As it struggles to regain a foothold in the market it was once sucha major player in, it's been firing out more Android-based Xperia smartphones than long-lost relatives on an episode of Jeremy Kyle. And they're not half bad either.
The Xperia Arc has been the flagship of 2011's bunch. Arriving in the spring, it became the skinny poster girl for the Swedish-Japanese hybrid, showing off its amazing screen presence with the help of the Sony Reality Display (the bit that reproduces colour on the screen and makes it look great) but in the Xperia Ray, Sony Ericsson has gone for a smaller model.
You can check out in moving pictures how the phone looks, with our special video review of the Xperia Ray:
Before we go any further, there is one point we have to make clear: this phone is small. And thin. Think smaller and thinner than you expect, then shave a bit more off your dimensions. That's what you get.
The Xperia Arc (we're going to be making lot of comparisons to the Arc in this review) is 125 x 63mm with a depth of 8.7mm. The Ray slices most of that off and comes in at a remarkable 111 x 53mm. It is slightly fatter, by less than a millimetre, clocking in at 9.4mm deep.
It reminds us very much of the original (and, at the time, revolutionary) HTC Touch Diamond from 2008 – a niche handset that only retro phone geeks are likely to recall.
Indeed, compared to the larger handsets we've become used to using, such as the Samsung Galaxy S2, Apple iPhone 4 and HTC Sensation, this really does feel teeny and we couldn't stop picking it up at first.
But it is no slouch. Under that hood, you'll find a not-too-shabby 8MP camera with HD video recording, Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread, HSUPA/HSDPA and 1GHz processor.
The Ray sits comfortably in the hand, and at 100g, you'll barely even notice it's there. Indeed if ever there was a candidate for a 'going out phone' that would slip unobtrusively into a pair of skinny jeans, this is most definitely it.
The rear has a matt finish that's only broken up by the camera lens and flash, plus a speaker near the bottom, crowned by a Sony Ericsson logo.
Around the side, there's little to comment on. The left has only a micro USB socket for charging/syncing, while the left houses a volume rocker.
Up top, you'll find little of interest other than a (thankfully easy to hit) power/sleep button and the 3.5mm socket for headphones of your choice.
The front is fairly minimalistic, made of a large sheet of glass broken up only by an earpiece and a physical Home button. The other two buttons that serve as Back and Options are both touch-sensitive jobs and, unfortunately, not as sensitive as we'd have liked.
Inside, you'll find 1GB of memory – although only 300MB is available to the user – and a slot for swapping microSD cards. You only get a 4GB card in the box compared to the 8GB the Xperia Arc ships with, which seems a little tight. But considering how cheap memory is these days, we'll not hold it against Sony Ericsson too much.
But here's an issue: the memory isn't hot swappable. Seriously, Sony Ericsson – is that too much to ask in the year 2011?
The handset is available in a number of colours, including gold, black, pink and white, catering for all members of fashion crowd, apparently.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray's screen is the same resolution as the Xperia Arc's amazing display, which means 480 x 854 pixels. But it's a lot smaller, at 3.3 inches, compared to the Xperia Arc's 4.2 inches, which means a much higher density.
Don't underestimate this – when you look at the Xperia Ray's display, you will not believe how clear it is. Put it next to an Apple Retina display and you'll notice there isn't much in it.
Colours on the whole look fantastic, although we were disappointed with the quality of our blue sky wallpapers, which looked a lot more washed out than they did on the Samsung Galaxy S2. Plus the clarity is incredible.
We did find that we often had to tap a button or function again because the first go didn't register. We had the same issue with the soft keys. It wasn't a deal breaker, but it was unresponsive enough for us to notice and get slightly frustrated.
We're shallow enough to admit that one thing we love is the animation when you turn the display off. Hit the Standby button and the screen decreases and disappears into a white line in a deliberate echo of the sequence we'd see in days gone by when turning off an old CRT TV set - first seen on the Google Nexus S.
It's a cosmetic addition that adds no functionality. It's a gimmick. And it's pointless. But man, did we love it. And so did all of our friends we showed it to. Small things, small minds.
As with all modern mobile phones, the glass is apparently toughened. We couldn't see any literature that defined it specifically as Gorilla Glass but whatever it is, it's not great.
Not only is the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray a fingerprint and dust magnet, the screen is also a scratch magnet. In the week that we had it, we noticed scratches appear at the rate of several per day. Don't get us wrong, they weren't huge, and indeed, we had to strain to look for them.
But if you're as OCD as us about keeping your precious looking precious, you won't like it. And putting a screen protector on (providing you can find one that fits exactly) will take away some of the sparkle.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray has just started hitting shelves at a very reasonable £299 SIM-free price. That's £50 cheaper than the Xperia Arc, which is almost identical, save for the size.
If you want to go on contract, it's available free on £25 a month deals (provided you sign 18-24 months of your life away.) On a 12-month contract, you're looking at about £50 for the phone, which is still very reasonable for what you're getting.
Without reinforcing a stereotype, we can't help feeling this is one for either the ladies or the smaller fingered men among us. Those who want a similar Android experience on a larger deviceare likely to plump for a Samsung Galaxy S2, HTC Sensation or, indeed, the Xperia Arc itself
The problem for any Android manufacturer is the same: how do we make our smartphone different? There are dozens of Android handsets on the market in this country, and it's the world's most-used mobile phone operating system. But that's also the problem, because it's reaching saturation point.
HTC has enjoyed phenomenal success with its HTC Sense skin that sits atop the Android platform and has become instantly recognisable through that big flip-style home screen clock widget. Samsung's given us TouchWiz and, in turn, Sony Ericsson brings Timescape to the table.
In essence, the main function of this overlay is a widget that sticks your social media updates on your front page, or wherever else you fancy putting them.
It's versatile in that you can add Twitter and Facebook updates out of the box but also install other extensions to get additional services. (Foursquare, Gmail, Orkut and Picassa are just a few of these – there are dozens on Android market, although curiously we couldn't see a LinkedIn extension.)
You can set it to update your notifications periodically and then swipe through them like a rolodex. SMS/MMS and missed calls can all be handled here too.
But for us, it just wasn't practical for two main reasons.
Firstly, we have a fair amount of Facebook friends but follow hundreds of people on Twitter. If Timescape updates all your Facebook and Twitter info together, you're going to be looking through it all day.
You can decide which services it checks and which it doesn't (so, for example, we selected Facebook only, to make it more manageable) but if you're doing that, what's the point? You may as well just use the individual Facebook and Twitter apps.
You'll probably end up doing that anyway, because that is our second point – Timescape is merely a launcher. If you scroll through and see a friend has, say, posted a link on a Facebook update, when you click it in Timescape, it just launches the Facebook app, which then gives you the link to click on, which then launches the browser. It's the same with photos and so on.
So you then have to exit the Facebook app to go back to the home screen to get back to your feeds and go through the whole rigmarole again. It's bitty and annoying and we'd much rather that Timescape had some kind of inbuilt image and web browser so that you could view all your Facebook and Twitter content in one place.
Luckily, being an Android phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray enables you to remove Timescape and just customise your screens with better widgets, which we'd advise you do.
Other widgets include a Favourites Quick Dial, which we liked because it had room for 12 people (we're very popular) plus obligatory elements such as quick toggles, Google search, weather and music/gallery controls. It's all effective, but there was nothing in there to jump out at you, and we couldn't help feeling it was all a bit pedestrian.
Sony Ericsson does give you a selection of themes to pick from, although they're all just coloured variations of the same pattern.
You can also reorder apps easily through the app drawer and create folders. It's a small blessing, but something we're glad to see, since many other Android manufacturers omit this for reasons known only to themselves.
The four shortcuts on the main screen dock at the bottom of the display can be easily reassigned whichever way you see fit by long-pressing the icon.
We did install some nice new live wallpapers, but were dismayed to see that the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray struggled with them. The standard Android ones were there, but when we tried to install the beautiful Flux free live wallpaper (which we've used on several Android handsets), it stuttered and stammered until we'd uninstalled and gone back to the original wallpaper.
This isn't what we'd expect from a 1GHz processor. Not. At. All.
There are five home screens for you to pick from. We couldn't see any way to increase this, which is a shame because you may fill them up quickly, but you can always plump for a free third-party launcher replacement if you like, to solve this.
Luckily, with Android, if you've used a handset with this operating system before, it's pretty similar, albeit with custom icons. And if you haven't used an Android phone then, along with iOS, it's one of the most intuitive systems out there.
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