Sony Ericsson Xperia Active, Not for the Couch Potatoes

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active is that kind of a phone made for kicking the butts of its competitors. Literally. This soldier over here can survive under water for half an hour, is dust proof and shock resistant and, besides being a tough guy, the Xperia active is also smart and you’ll find out what I’m talking about if reading the following review. Let’s take a look at the main specs:

Key features

•    Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
•    3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
•    3.0" 16M-color LED-backlit LCD capacitive touchscreen of HVGA resolution (320 x 480 pixels) at around 192 ppi
•    Bravia Mobile engine
•    Dust and water resistant, wet-finger tracking
•    Dual back cover design for increased protection
•    Arm case and wrist strap in the bundle
•    Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread
•    1 GHz MSM8255 Snapdragon processor
•    512 MB RAM
•    5 MP autofocus camera, single LED flashlight, Geo-tagging, image stabilization, smile detection, touch focus
•    720p video @ 30fps
•    Wi-Fi b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot functionality and DLNA
•    GPS with A-GPS, Wisepilot navigation
•    microSD slot (32GB supported, 2GB card included)
•    Accelerometer and proximity sensor, notification LED
•    Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
•    Stereo FM radio with RDS
•    TrackID music recognition
•    Relevant package of apps
•    MicroUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
•    Adobe Flash 10.3 support
•    1200mAh Li-ion battery

 Full specs here.

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In its box, you’ll find the charger, a microUSB cable used for both charging and making data connections, a pair of headphones with in-ear buds, an exchangeable rear cover, a 2 GB microSD card, a wrist strap, an arm case, some ear hooks for your earphones and the user manuals.

 Wow, that’s really something, isn’t it ? In this package, you’ve got everything you need for taking your phone everywhere you go and not worry about it.

When reading all the above, I bet you expect this phone to be a heavy and bulky device, but it’s not. It measures 92 x 55 x 16.5 mm and has a weight of 110.8 g, so it’s not heavy at all. It feels comfortable in the hand and your pockets will like it too. Its design is nice and sporty, you’ll find it to be an interesting device to look at and handle. Its back is curved and rubberized, feeling nice in the hand and it also keeps your fingerprints away from sticking to it. The most important thing about it is that you won’t be afraid of dropping it on the floor or in your soup ( I wanted to say toilet, but that would be kind of gross).

The Xperia active comes with a 3 inches LED-backlit LCD capacitive touchscreen that has a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels, a ~192 ppi pixel density, scratch resistant glass and is also powered by Sony’s Bravia Mobile engine. Its colors are bright and vibrant, the contrast is great and the sunlight legibility is wonderful – as it should be, as a matter of fact, because the phone is made for being used mostly outdoors.
The screen can be handled with wet fingers and is still very responsive. How cool is that ? You’ll be able to make phone calls and stuff like that in the shower, or if it rains – this fellow is not afraid of water.
Above its screen are the earpiece, a status LED and the proximity and ambient light sensors.
Beneath the display are the microphone, three capacitive keys for Back, Home and Menu and a strap eyelet.
The left side of the phone is home for the lonely Power/Lock key.
On the right side of the phone reside the volume rocker and camera key.
There’s nothing at the top, meanwhile at the bottom, you’ll see the 3.5 mm audio jack and the microUSB port.

If you take out the phone’s battery cover, you’ll find.. another battery cover. Under these two are the SIM and microSD card slots and the battery.
Now that we’ve seen how strong it is, let’s check out the Xperia active’s brain. It comes loaded with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and is upgradeable to v4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. It also has the Timescape user interface, which gathers your call logs, email, SMS, MMS, Facebook and Twitter updates and enables you to filter the contents and see the important information only.
Our little champion is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon processor, having a 1 GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, 1 GB of internal memory (but only 320 MB are user available) and 1 GB of RAM. The overall performance of the phone is great, as it’s very snappy and won’t bug you with lag issues, freezes and stuff like that.

In terms of telephony, the Xperia active comes with a smart phonebook that remembers tons of information about your contacts, syncs with your online accounts, has the quick contacts feature and voice dialing. The phone has a secondary microphone for active noise cancellation, so, the in-call quality is great, with the voices being loud and clear for both ends of the line and the reception was also free of problems.
At the messaging section, your SMS and MMS are organized in threads and displayed as conversations between you and your contacts. You can copy, paste, lock your messages against deletion and search within them for a certain one.
For instant messaging, Google Talk is here for you and supports clients like Pidgin, iChat, Kopete and others.
Your emails are managed by Gmail, which supports batch operations, and by a generic email application, that handles your other email accounts.

For typing, you get the Gingerbread on screen virtual QWERTY keyboard for portrait and landscape modes and a numeric pad that’s available only in portrait mode. Typing is pretty easy if you don’t have sausage-fingers, but even if you do, the landscape mode will be of a real help.
At the connectivity department, the phone has support for quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA, Wi-Fi b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and EDR and microUSB 2.0.

For surfing the web, you have the Gingerbread standard browser that comes with support for Adobe Flash 10.3 and has a simple user interface. It also features text reflow, double tap and pinch zooming, multiple tabs and switching between them, bookmarks, find on page and others. The pages are loaded fast and the overall browsing experience is very pleasing.
The Xperia active comes equipped with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera that takes pictures at a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels and has a single LED flash for helping in low light situations. The camera interface features geo-tagging, touch focus, image stabilization, face detection and others. The image quality is very good, with accurate colors and decent amount of resolved detail.
The video camera is also very capable and produces 720p videos at 30 fps.
For audio playback, you get a fancy music player which is very similar to the Walkman players and features several equalizer presets, the Infinite key for searching a song on YouTube, the xLOUD enhancement for boosting the loudspeaker volume and others. The audio quality is great.
For watching videos, you don’t have a dedicated player, as the videos reside in the gallery, but you can easily download one.

In its basket of goodies, the Xperia active carries some nice applications, like the WalkMate for counting your footsteps during a day, the iMapMyFITNESS+ for information about your training, which are sent to your mapmyfitness.com account, which is free. For viewing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, you have the Office Suite. You also have Notes, Reminders, Calendar, Calculator, Alarm  - which has the desk clock and night modes. A Facebook app is also on board.
A built-in GPS receiver is also here and has support for A-GPS. For navigation, you have Google Maps.
The Xperia active holds inside its tough body a 1200 mAh battery and it endured almost a day and a half on moderate usage.

In conclusion, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active is a great choice if you’re living an active life. If you’re going hiking, for example, this phone is going to be your best buddy and you won’t have to worry about it if it rains cats and dogs over you or if you drop it into a puddle of mud. This fellow is both a survivor and a smart guy, so you’ll definitely grow feelings for it and keep it close in your adventures.