The Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro was launched in May 2011 and is a cute, reliable phone which offers some nice features, given the fact that it’s almost two years old. If you’re not a big fan of huge screens and big phone-brains, you’ll like this sweetheart over here. It’s small, looks nice and comes with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that’s a real blessing when you’re texting. Want to find out more about this promising guy? Check out the following review!
Key features
• Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
• 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
• 3" 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit LCD touchscreen, HVGA res (320 x 480), Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine
• Full four-row, slide-out QWERTY keyboard
• Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread
• 1 GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 chipset
• 512 MB RAM
• 5 MP autofocus camera, LED flash, geotagging
• 720p video @ 30fps, continuous autofocus
• Front facing VGA camera
• Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
• GPS with A-GPS
• microSD slot (32GB supported, 2GB card included)
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
• Voice dialing
• Adobe Flash 10.3 support
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In the little fellow’s crib, I mean box, you’ll find the charger, a microUSB cable that serves for charging and making data connections, a 2 GB microSD card, the headphones and some user manuals.
The Mini pro measures 92 x 53 x 18 mm and has a weight of 136 g. You’ll think of it as being a fatso - at least, I thought that when I first read about its measuring, but I’ve changed my mind after seeing it. It is a little chubby, but it didn’t bother me when handling it. Your pockets will befriend it too. Even if the phone is entirely made from plastic, it seems to be very well put together and its design is also cute. If you’re not a fan of virtual keyboards and prefer the physical ones, you’ll love the Xperia Mini pro, because it’s just what you need when it comes to fast typing. But I’ll bring that into discussion a little later. Let’s find out some stuff about its display, shall we?
The Xperia Mini pro comes with a 3 inches LED-backlit LCD capacitive touch screen that has a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels, a ~192 ppi pixel density, has a scratch resistant glass and is powered by the Sony Bravia Mobile Engine. The screen is highly responsive, its colors are pretty bright and the contrast is good too. The viewing angles are decent and the sunlight legibility is great.
Above the screen stand the earpiece, a status LED, the proximity and ambient light sensors and a secondary front-facing camera for making video calls.
Below the screen, you’ll see two haptic enabled capacitive keys for Menu and Back. Between them stands the Home hardware control.
The left side of the phone hosts a small opening for removing the battery cover.
On the right side are the volume rocker and a shutter button.
The top is home for the Power/Lock key, 3.5 mm audio jack, microUSB port and a secondary microphone.
At the bottom stands a lonely lanyard eyelet.
If sliding the phone, you’ll see its full QWERTY keyboard, which is great for texting, having a nice placement for its keys. If you have really big hands, it’ll take some time for getting used to it, but you’ll get there.
The Xperia Mini pro comes loaded with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and the Timescape user interface. It’s upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich. The phone is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset, holding a 1 GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, 512 MB of RAM and 400 MB of internal storage. The user experience offered is quite nice, as the phone runs smooth through the interface and I didn’t experience any lag issues or stuff like that.
The Timescape gathers your call logs, emails, SMS, MMS and your Facebook and Twitter updates. It allows you to filter the information displayed by type and, if it doesn’t get you completely satisfied, you can download some plugins and upgrade it.
The Xperia mini pro has a nice phonebook, which remembers tons of information about your contacts, syncs with multiple accounts, has the quick contacts feature and others. There’s no smart dialing available, but you still have voice dialing.
The in-call quality was very good for both ends of the line – we have to say thanks to the secondary microphone for active noise cancellation. I didn’t experience any reception problems either.
The phone is a real expert when it comes to messaging. It organizes your SMS and MMS into threads and displays them as conversations between you and your contacts, offering you the possibility of copying, deleting them, locking them against deletion, searching for a certain message and others.
For emailing, you have Gmail, which supports batch operations, and a generic email application that manages your other email accounts.
For instant messaging, Google Talk is here for you and is compatible with clients like iChat, Pidgin, Ovi Contacts and others.
For typing, you get two on-screen virtual QWERTY keyboards – one for each mode: portrait and landscape, but I seriously doubt you’ll be using them, as the phone has a great physical QWERTY keyboard.
In its connectivity basket, the Xperia Mini pro carries support for quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Wi-Fi Hotspot, DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0.
For surfing the web, you have the Gingerbread browser, which comes with a simple user interface, has support for Adobe Flash 10.3, double tap and pinch zooming, text reflow, bookmarks, multiple tabs, find on page and others. The overall browsing experience is very nice, as the pages load fast and look quite nice even if the phone doesn’t have a big screen.
The Xperia Mini pro comes equipped with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera that has a single LED flash and is capable of producing pictures at a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. It also offers settings for image stabilization, touch focus, smile and face detection, geo-tagging and others. The image quality is fine.
The video camera is also quite capable and produces 720p videos at 30 fps.
For audio playback, you have a good looking music player that has some nice features, among them being some equalizer presets, the xLOUD functionality for boosting the speaker volume, the Infinite key, which searches a song on YouTube and others. The audio quality is great.
An FM Radio is also on board and comes with RDS support and Track ID for song recognition.
For watching movies, I recommend downloading a video player that knows some things about formats and stuff.
When it comes to applications, the phone has the Office Suite for viewing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. We also have the Calendar, Calculator, Alarms.
A built-in GPS receiver is on board and has support for A-GPS. For navigation, you have Google Maps.
The Xperia mini pro holds a 1200 mAh battery inside and will endure almost two days of moderate usage.
My final words about the Sony Xperia Mini Pro are that even if this little fellow seems like an old, fusty phone (compared to the smartphone-beasts that are wandering out there), I give you that it’s pretty smart and capable enough for answering your needs.
