Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Ratner from TechnoBuffalo here and this is my eighth time filming this intro I'm hoping it's the charm we are given a full review of Sony Ericsson's new flagship smartphone the Xperia Arc that we saw make its debut at CES 2011 let's go ahead take a look and see if it lives up to that flagship name coming up with new ways to say does it live up to is getting harder and harder alright so let's run through the specs very quickly of this extremely thin smartphone it's got a odd size 4.2 inch diagonal screen the resolution of 480 by 854 it's running Sony's new Mobile BRAVIA Engine which we'll talk about at length it's one of the few phones out now that's got Android 2.3 Gingerbread it's got Sony's proprietary Timescape UI you're gonna get some new widgets and have your information arranged in a hierarchy type order I'm not the biggest fan we've talked about it though at length on the back god has a fairly common 8 megapixel camera with some very uncommon features that we will also talk about flash and autofocus are here it can record 720p video at 30 frames per second it's got a 1 gigahertz scorpion processor in it with a 1500 milliamp hour battery all right specs your specs how does they actually come together in a full package let's talk first about call quality of the Xperia Arc you can probably see by that arc shape where it gets its name from much like its friend that shares a lot of specs with it the Xperia Play color quality was just about average this is nothing to write home about you're not gonna think well this is the best call I ever made things sound awesome but you're not gonna think it sounds really crappy I can't hear anything it's just good enough that you're not gonna notice that it's bad if that makes sense its average phone calls I didn't have many drop calls I did do my 20 call tests and I had three so just about average and I was using AT&T 3G network I shouldn't mention this guy is available unlocked and thank you to the folks at clove code kay for sending this over if you want to take a look and get one for yourself link will be down below to pick one of these bad boys up so call quote is average speakerphone was average I didn't have a new Bluetooth connection issues though that I had with the Xperia Play so something to keep in mind alright so with 2 mentioned during the overview that it's got Sony's Mobile BRAVIA Engine what does that mean in the world of qHD and AMOLED and Super AMOLED plus and Super AMOLED double extra Super Plus screen resolution and screen quality is all the rage and this is Sony Ericsson sort of foray into those high quality screens and I gotta say this is one of the best implementations that I've seen images look absolutely gorgeous so I've got an image here in the gallery go ahead and zoom in colors pop blacks are very very black pretty decent visibility in direct sunlight as well and you don't get that sort of a haze on white areas that you have with other screens I'm looking at you original AMOLED Super AMOLED plus doesn't have it that bad screen is just absolutely beautiful when you're looking at text so if I jump on over to the web for example and we take a look at a site perhaps like TechnoBuffalo something I can select the icon there we go you can see the whites actually look pretty white they don't have that tint that I mentioned earlier the screen here is really really very pretty so we're on sort of Twitter feed you can see that it does look very nice we'll go ahead and exit out of that there we go now you can actually look at the website text is going to be very crisp and very clear you're gonna have no problem reading text on this I wouldn't necessarily read an e-book although you could because it's Android there's a ton of you book options but it looks very very very nice and very solid alright so it's called the arc the AR see and everybody makes funny jokes that know I should have reviewed this phone and then you could have said it was Noah's Arc and honestly if I thought about that we probably would have had no review because those jokes would just be funny and awesome so it is called the arc because of its arced shape the arc shape makes this phone through really nice in the hand right where you hold it in the middle it is extremely and it tapers out on both sides this is one of the most enjoyable phones to hold I know that sounds very weird but holding some of the chunkier phones because a little bit strange it just feels very very nice and it's extremely thin if you look at it for example if we make a little smartphone sandwich next something like the Xperia Play which of course has that slide-out keyboard is gonna add some thickness you can really appreciate how thin this phone really is if you look at something like the Droid Charge again you can really see how thin this is and just because I know you Android folks want to see it here it is next to the iPhone 4 which at one point was the smallest or thinnest smartphone out there and now the Xperia Arc just absolutely dorset this thing is just so very very thin so for as good as the design is Sony made some weird design cues so if you saw a my review of the Xperia Play I talked about the strange button alignment here on the bottom and how they're a bit out of order for we've seen on previous Android smartphones well evidently Sony assigned take that a little bit further and got rid of some buttons here on the Xperia Arc so if you go ahead and take a look at a traditional Android phone so we bring in the charge here you've got your menu button your home button your back button and your search button here you've just got a back button home button and a menu button a little bit weird if you want to get your search on we got to go ahead and do it with a soft button because unfortunately we're missing it that fourth one right there this is running Gingerbread which has a really really awesome application management system built right in and generally in stock Gingerbread to access that all you got to do is hit the menu button and you can access it right there however Sony decided to make things simpler I guess and get rid of that option so if you want to access that you got to make a shortcut to it on your home screen or access it directly from your apps I found that to be very very annoying all right so I don't generally talk about cameras in my reviews because usually they're all varying degrees of suck they snap pictures you can take a shot of your dog or your friends out of a club but you're not gonna blow them up and chances are it's not going to replace your primary camera however the Xperia Arc comes very close to camera quality and features let me go ahead and show you some will jump into camera we don't have a hard button for for camera you got your typical Android looking camera options however what you've got is that little guy smiling at you and this is the smile detection actually what this will do is when you have somebody in frame so if I had a face right there and I was going to smile as soon as I smiled it would snap the picture so if you take photos of kids and they're trying to get them to sit still this is a really nice feature something to keep in mind that I really liked with the Xperia Arc this is not something that's offered in all of Sony Ericsson's up phones all right so let's talk about speed for all of you processor junkies and benchmarking junkies it received a quadrant score of one thousand three hundred and sixty one so certainly wasn't set in the world on fire with its quadrant speed it was okay it was actually lower than the Xperia Play which came at 1392 but all those numbers don't mean much if the phone is going to work well for you and this phone is pretty snappy one of the areas where I generally notice slowness is in the browser so if we look at a TechnoBuffalo which does have Flash content here you can see how slow that lets actually load up the browser it's not overly quick there's a little bit of lag with Flash turned off though it's pretty zippy but if you look at some of the dual core phones that's really where you see a difference and this is just a single core which generally I don't say is the biggest deal but when you're looking at Flash content and you're doing very processor intensive things having that extra core it really does come into handy so this is by no means a slow phone at all but it does exist in the world of other phones out there when dual core is becoming a standard whether you're dealing with NVIDIA Tegra 2 or whether or not you're dealing with dual core Snapdragon this just doesn't have it so while it's excellent for today's standards and specs if you're good looking to sign into your contract it does offer on your carrier you're looking to spend these several hundred dollar it's gonna cost to get this thing unlocked chances are you're not going to be buying a phone or another phone in the next year so and you want to get some that's going to be future proof and you just don't have that option here unfortunately so do I recommend this phone absolutely for right now it is a solidly SPECT phone in a gorgeous package but it's not future proof so you don't have support for full HSPA+ you don't have LTE you're not gonna have that dual core which is probably going to become standard in the next year so you're gonna get a phone that's going to work great now and developer has certainly been making tons of applications but it's not gonna be optimized for dual core phones that will be coming out inevitably in the next few months so if you're in the market for a phone that's going to work well it's going to give you a relatively decent speed and looks damn good while doing it the Xperia Arc is going to be a very solid phone however if you're one of the few that needs to have the latest and greatest technology this is by no means a future-proof phone and you might be better off waiting for the Ark to which presumably will have dual core or another Sony Ericsson phone which will sports two cores so guys hope you enjoy curious what you think about the Xperia Arc whether or not it's for you I am John render from TechnoBuffalo and I will see you in the next video bye-bye