About Me

A simple technological geek with an insane passion for the Android OS, smart-phones and tablets.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

At Last.....

Introduction:

Have you ever seen something and fell in love with it as soon as you saw it ? Well I'm a teenager and also a big tech freak,geek etc. and so that happens to me more than you'd expect. There is currently a technological revolution taking place for the past three years and it is being led by a little Green Robot. Yes, I'm talking about none other than Google's Android. I'm pretty sure most of you know about it but for those who don't it's Google's Mobile Operating System. Now many people have asked me why I didn't choose the iOS in the iPhone or settle with BlackBerry. Well there are simple reasons for both. First and foremost,an iPhone is way too expensive for me and I'm not exactly a businessman or a socialist so all those professional features and BlackBerry Messenger in BlackBerry isn't exactly for me.

So that's why I chose the most popular OS and besides it's made by Google a more than sufficient reason to try it out because I wouldn't have become the genius I am now without Google. My fascination and curiosity for Android grew as the days went by. I started playing games less during my holidays and started reading articles about Android and all kinds of Android smartphones made by pretty much every manufacturer like HTC,Samsung etc. In April,I was doing the usual reading when I saw an article about Sony Ericsson releasing a few more smartphones to their Xperia line-up. There were three phones mentioned in the article, the Xperia Play(World's first PlayStation Phone) , the Xperia Neo which was a smaller,fatter but almost identical feature listed phone as the Xperia Arc(Sony Ericsson's top-of-the-line Android Smartphone) and then in the corner,overshadowed by the Play was the phone I couldn't take my eyes off and that was the Xperia Pro.

Features:

Every smartphone is listed with features that tend to confuse those who don't know what to expect from their phones. For those who do, it's a different story because they are spoilt with choice. The features listed on the Pro were superb and considered top-of-the-line when it was showcased in February but it's late launch October has made it just a mid-range phone compared to the dual-core behemoths leading the market. Anyways the Pro runs on the latest version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread and it has a 3.7" TFT LED-backlit LCD Capacitive screen with a resolution of 480x854 pixels. It has a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor aided by 512 RAM. It has 1 GB internal storage out of which only 320 MB is available to the user but it comes with expandable memory via microSD upto 32 GB. It also has a beautiful 8.1 megapixel camera with LED flash capable of recording 720 p HD videos and it utilises Sony's Exmor-R sensor for taking pictures in low light conditions. It has Sony Bravia Engine to enhance videos and photos and xLoud feature for enhancing volume while listening to songs through the loudspeaker. Sony Ericsson have customised the base Android UI by overlaying their Timescape UI so you get five homescreens which are customisable with widgets, folders and shortcuts to applications etc.

A few more........

All the features are awesome in their own right but the main feature that floored me was the slide-out four row QWERTY keyboard. I just can't stress what a beautiful keyboard Sony Ericsson made infact the keyboard is so splendid I wrote this entire article on my Pro's keyboard. The keys are evenly placed out, soft to touch and easy to type even for my big thumbs. There are two more unique and useful features on the phone. Here's the first, suppose your on one homescreen and are wondering on which homescreen you placed a particular widget,take for example the music player widget,what do you do? Well you could do the boring thing of searching each homescreen OR you could do the cool thing by pinching the screen your in to see all your widgets float on the screen and then just tapping the widget to go to the homescreen it's in. Pretty neat,huh? The second one is in the email app. The screen is then split in two with the list of emails on the left and the preview on the right. You can drag the separator left or right to see the only the list of emails or to see the entire email. Whats even better is that when you slide out the keyboard it automatically asks if you want to reply,reply all or forward. Now that is cool atleast in my opinion.

Battery Life

Smartphones nowadays aren't exactly known for their battery life and the Pro is no different but it's way better than what I expected. I listened to songs, browsed the net, downloaded apps while playing games and yet I had got through the day with 20 % charge left. That is just great for me. I've heard it lasts even upto 18 hours with more usage. That isn't bad either.

Verdict

So was waiting 7 months for the Pro worth it? You'll know when you see the huge smile on my face when I say "Oh Yeah!". At 1799 AED its not exactly at the low end of the market but you get the exact same features as the 2099 AED Xperia Arc S except for the 4.3" screen and the 1.2 GHz Processor but atleast you get the bonus of a physical keyboard. For those who text and email alot I'd recommend this phone wholeheartedly but for those who don't you can go for the Xperia Neo which is an exact twin to this except for the keyboard.

Hope you all enjoyed reading as much as I did writing(On the Pro's keyboard).

This is AJ signing off.