Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc review

Product Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc
Website http://www.sonyericsson.com
Specifications 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 1GB storage, 4.2-inch 480x854 TFT display, 8MP rear camera, Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, 63x125x8.7mm, 117g.
Price £399 SIM free

SONY ERICSSON'S Xperia Arc is a decent smartphone with a great design and some nice features including a stunning screen and a high quality camera.

The Arc is a strikingly attractive looking phone with a unique design. The casing is gloss black on the front and the sides are the usual chrome trim that we are familiar with on Xperia handsets. The back is an unusual concave shape with a black cover that fades to silver at the bottom.

The curved back makes the phone really comfortable to hold both one handed in portrait mode and two handed in landscape mode. The only disappointment is that the case is entirely plastic, which does makes it light but also gives it a flimsy feel, making the build quality feel lower than most phones.

Below the screen are three physical buttons like past Xperia models, which consist of back, home and menu. These are a much better choice than the four Sony Ericsson squeezed in on the Xperia Play. There is a power button on the top but this is unorthodoxly on the left hand side and annoyingly small.

On the right side is the microUSB port above the volume controls that, like the power button, are quite small. There is also the nice addition of a dedicated camera button on the right hand side. The headphone socket is on the left hand side and a microHDMI port is found on the top of the phone on the right hand side.

One last design element to note is that the notification light that informs you of things like a new text message or low battery is confusingly situated on the side of the phone, where you will never see it.

As well as being nice to hold the Arc is really thin at 8.7mm at its thinnest point and it weighs only 117g, which makes it one of the lightest handsets we've seen. For comparison it is only 1g heavier than the Samsung Galaxy S II and fully 47g lighter than the HTC Desire HD, which has similar specifications.

The screen is the top feature of the Arc for us. It is a large 4.2in TFT panel with the same 480x854 resolution as the Xperia Play. Although the pixels are spread out over a slightly larger area than the Play, the image is still nice and crisp and it doesn't have the brightness problems that we found on the gaming handset.

The screen looks impressive no matter what you're doing on the phone. It uses a Mobile Bravia Engine which is just some extra branding to us, but nevertheless image quality is top notch with great contrast and vibrant colours. The responsiveness to touch is excellent, as you'd expect from a high end handset.

One of our main concerns is that the phone's hardware doesn't compete with rival models from other vendors. The 1GHz processor is a single core chip whereas most other firms are releasing dual core processors making them much faster. There is a rather mean 512MB of RAM and only 1GB of internal storage. The only saving grace is that an 8GB microSD card comes with the phone, but even that's a little small for modern use.

Although the processor is only a single core chip we found that it coped well the vast majority of the time. We did see some occasional lag with a few of the more demanding tasks that we haven't experienced on dual core handsets.