17 May 2011

The Arc review

Steve's Phone Show review of the Xperia Arc with a little help from me is now available to view (complete with hideous thumbnail, courtesy of YouTube!)

A quick summary:

  • Slim hardware in the middle of the phone, with thicker top and bottom, housing the phono and microUSB slots. Sadly, these are on the sides, not the top (my preferred location for headset socket) and bottom (my strongly preferred location for the charger, to make it easier to use Brodit powered car mounts or desktop chargers). To be fair, Brodit have created a sideways slide-in mount for this phone, but those can never be quite as elegant as a "drop-in" design.  
  • Quite angular corners on the handset - I like it to look at, but not so much in use, but that's really just a personal preference.
  • Crisp screen, but no automatic brightness display, and some slight distortion in the review copy I used. However, this was only noticeable on close inspection of vertical lines close to the edge of the display (e.g. when playing WordFeud ;-) ).
  • A triumph of form over function for Contacts - graphic designers gone mad, without any apparent thought for usability.
  • I couldn't get the WiFi to work with either of the two routers I tried it with. However, Steve didn't have any problems. This is clearly one of those situations where both the phone and router affect the situation.
  • See Steve's views on the camera.
This won't be my device of choice (even without the show-stopping WiFi issues), but I quite enjoyed using it for the week.  

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