I’ve had this phone for a few months now, an upgrade from my S-E X10 Mini Pro; it’s a phenominal improvement on the previous version… so much so I’m a little lost as to where to begin with it. Perhaps I should start with it’s magical and wonderful design…
Design
This thing is an actual miracle of design. I’m not talking about “we made an antenna which is worse that the previous generation, isn’t it magical” design; I’m talking about more conventional industrial design. Consider: the S-E X10 Mini Pro had a 2.5", 240x320 screen, a 600 MHz ARM6 CPU, a pokey 128 MB of RAM, and an excellent but limited keyboard[1]. The camera was a bit of a disappointment after my excellent S-E C903, too.
For the Mini Pro it appears someone at Sony-Ericsson said to the design team, “People like it, but they want more of everything.” And boy, we got it. The screen is now a 3", 320x480 unit, the CPU a 1 GHz model with an Adreno 205 GPU, 512 MB of RAM, and there is an extra row of keys on the keyboard, which makes it that much more usable. Oh, and a front-facing camera for video calls.
The kicker? It’s the same size. No, really. I couldn’t believe it. When I unwrapped the phone, it just looked… bigger. And then when I laid them on top of one another and then side by side, the physical package is almost identical. The Mini Pro has less curved sides. That’s about it. With basically no extra space, they’ve built a phone that’s at least twice as powerful, with key features I was missing (video calling). It is brilliant. It retains all the strengths of the X10 Mini Pro—a ‘droid with a brilliantly usable hardware keyboard, pocket-friendly size, perfect for one-handed use, and a feel akin to a well-made car; sturdy, without feeling rugged. And it packs it with every feature I care about on a phone, to the extent that modern smartphone operating systems allow.
Probably the only thing I was less that overjoyed about was that the keyboard has a slightly less clicky feel than its predecessor. Given that most people seem to buy softer keyboards rather than old-school clacking models I’m prepared to acknowledge that’s probably a minority opinion.
Camera
The camera on phones has been important for me for, oh, about 4 years now. I stuck with a crappy cell for a long time, until the day I realised how many technically rubbish photos I had of my daughter because the only camera I always carried was a horrid little half-megapixel unit. I ended up buying the best cameraphone I could afford, the S-E K750i, and I haven’t looked back. Yes, I have a nice DSLR, and I’ve added a nifty Panasonic waterproof compact to my arsenal, but I always have a phone. Camera quality is a key consideration for me.
I had a succession of S-E camera phones; the K750i, the K850i, and the C903. All had brilliant, high-quality cameras; the oldest of them made a mockery of vastly more expensive phones, and that continued right through to the C903. I was very underwhelmed by the camera in the X10 mini pro, which seemed like a step back from the K and C series phones. The Mini Pro is a return to form; true, the sensor is “only” a 5MP unit, but it’s from the same Exmoor line that S-E use in their higher-end phones, and indeed in their compact cameras; likewise, the software smarts are good, although with more limited controls than the higher-end S-E phones.
Qualifications aside, I’m happy with it as a camera; I’ve got some photos ranging from nice through to very good; good enough, in fact, to print out at A4 size and frame, which is about the limit of what I feel I can reasonably expect of a phone.
Video gets 720p recording, and I’ve been happy with the quality.
Another big win is the return of video calling; moving from my dumbphones to my smartphone cost me that facility, and it’s nice as hell to have it back. I love being able to call my kid on my French class nights and have her see me when we say good night.
Screen
Lovely. There’s some sort of fancy Sony branding associated with the screen, and it’s lovely. Nice resolution, crisp, clear, good colours. I know this isn’t just me, because when I show it to people they are clearly surprised by how good it is, and how good photos and movies look on it.
Software
The biggest disappointment of the X10 Mini Pro wasn’t the hardware, though; in fact, I was pretty fond of the hardware. They keyboard was a miracle—nothing that small should feel so good with my great fat fingers—and I could live with many of the performance compromises for such a small, convenient smartphone. What I loathed, though, was the software. I went so far as to suggest that the performance of the Xcyanogenmod teams should embarrass the S-E software teams.
The first problem was versions: the S-E X10s all launched with 1.6 firmware at a time most vendors were not only shipping with 2.1; my S-E X10 Mini Pro came with 2.1, but it didn’t arrive in New Zealand until most vendors were on 2.2 and planning their 2.3 rollouts. Android 2.2 was light years ahead of 2.1; as well as the Dalvik JIT compiler (a useful speedup on the slow A6 CPU) it had the crucial App2SD feature - incredibly useful on a phone with only 128 MB of storage, but an SD slot that could take a 16 GB card. S-E appeared to have spent so much time dinking around with their TimeScape UI enhancements to Android that they were dropping the ball on the core functionality. And the X10-era TimeScape pretty much sucked. I was left with a home screen that could really only have a pitiful 4 icons, with four “bonus” launcher icons, and both the home and app screens required paging and paging and paging through to get to applications. It was horrid.
And then, worst of all, they announced there would never be a 2.2 or 2.3 for the X10 Mini pro. Users were stranded. They also had one of the few uncracked bootloaders and no easy way of getting root, just to add insult to injury.
S-E have learned so many lessons from the debacle around software, though, I think it’s worth breaking their responses into sections, because the Xperia Mini Pro is so much better it might as well come from a different company.
Let’s start with…
Control
It’s my damn phone. I gave you money for it. Now I want to use it as I see fit.
This isn’t a mantra that’s terribly popular with cellphone vendors, and it’s been embraced and extended by Apple. In the Android world it’s got a mixed reception, with Google insisting people ought to be able to root their phones, but many vendors begging to differ. S-E used to be one of the hardliners on that front; they’ve modified their stance considerably with the 2011 phones. In fact, I dial in the service codes for my phone (officially published by S-E) to see if my phone is one of the rootable, un-locked models, and then give S-E my IMEI number et voilà! my phone is rooted and ready for any tinkering I might care to inflict on it. This is an official, vendor-supported mechanism, with the caveat that you may void your warranty depending on what you do with it, which is fair enough.
Keeping Current
These shipped with Android 2.3 when Android 2.3 was the major Android phone release. Android 4 was just announced, and S-E were one of the first manufacturers to announce they plan on widespread upgrades to their current platforms—in fact, every single 2011 phone is slated to get 4.0. That’s a huge, huge improvement on the X10 generation.
Customisation
S-E originally made a huge fuss about the TimeScape UI enhancements; given the small size of the Mini Pro line of phones, they obviously felt additional hacking was in order to cram everything in. Unfortunately this ended up with a lot of the storage and small screen real estate feeling like it was being wasted on crapware. Simple things were a drag—the Applications screen always appended new applications and there was no option to auto-organise, so you were left forever re-ordering things as you installed them.
With the latest release of the TimeScape UI, S-E have made a lot of small improvements; I can set the Applications to an alphabetical ordering, for example. There are some handy widgets to switch data on and off. The amount of Sony and S-E branded extras feels less overwhelming. The four corner “hotspots” on the homescreen have been turned into drawers, allowing you to stash 3 shortcuts in each, to give you up to 12 omnipresent popups, with another 12 icons per homescreen (a 4 x 4 grid with the four corners missing). All in all, it feels more like vanilla Android with some nice tweaks and enhancements (acts as USB host!), rather than a butchered, cut-down experience.
With my old phone I ended up running a completely non-standard setup. With my new one, I’m running very close to stock. It’s a world of difference.
Overall
I’m incredibly happy with the Mini Pro. Probably the only phone I could imagine making me reconsider it - other than the next generation - is the full-sized Xperia Pro, but I’m unconvinced the larger, back-pocket-unfriendly size is worth the HDMI output and longer battery life. I would totally recommend one of these to anyone who’s sceptical about the “bigger is better” trend in phones, who loves a hardware keyboard, or who values a vendor offering some support for being able to tinker.
[1] By limited I mean it had, e.g., left and right arrows, but no up and down; there were a variety of similar compromises that left me reaching for the meta key more often than I wanted.