Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray

While we don't want to pigeon-hole anyone, it's clear that the Xperia Ray will appeal to users who are new to smartphones. That's a good thing though, and Sony Ericsson has really thought about its audience and has designed the phone to appeal to those people.

For example, there are several colours available, from a bog-standard black, to a tasty champagne sort of shade, which is the colour we got as a review sample. We liked this, it's a bit different and the phone is incredibly good-looking as a result.

There are three buttons on the front surface. Two are soft-keys for back and the context sensitive menu control. The third is a hardware home key, which is located between the other two controls. This layout breaks a little from the standard Android form, but we like it, and it works well. The home key is surrounded by a notification light too, that glows green or red, to keep you updated as to what the phone status is. For normal use though, it just glows with a standard backlight blue/white colour. The home key can also be used to wake the phone up, as can the power button, which is located at the top of the handset, next to the headphone jack.

The only real design flaw we could find, early on, was that the screen is slightly raised, and not flush with the case. This was a worry, because we thouhgt we'd catch our fingers on it, and enjoy a less than fluid touchscreen experience. We needn't have worried though, we never noticed it when we actually started using the phone.

The thing we were most worried about, after the ridge on the screen, was the display size. We're used to smartphones with massive screens, and the Ray has a pretty tiny one. In practice though, and like Ericsson phones of old, the fact that the screen has such a high resolution means that you never really notice that it's physically smaller.

Indeed, the Xperia Ray has a 297ppi display, thanks to 854 x 480 pixel squished into a 3.3-inch unit. That's just 29ppi fewer than the iPhone 4 with its Retina display. It shows too, because the Sony Ericsson has one of the crispest, most detailed screens we've seen. It's actually very impressive when you take your first look at it. Compare it with most Android handsets, and it will immediately stand-out from the other devices.

The only slight issue we did have, was that because the screen is physically small, that can mean typing on it is hard. Honestly, this is likely to be more of a problem for men, with larger fingers. If you're a lady or gentleman with dainty digits, this will not be a problem.

It's also worth pointing out that, although the screen has a very high resolution, that doesn't prevent the phone from feeling a little cramped when you're browsing a webpage. This is inevitable with smaller screens and there's no amount of extra resolution that can really help.

One big surprise was that Sony Ericsson has fitted the Xperia Ray with a 1500mAh battery. This is the same capacity as you'd find in phones with much larger screens and it is this that gives the Ray a boost in battery life.

With over an hour of phone calls, we still got around 14 hours or so from the phone. We could tweak the backlight a little, or cut down on web browsing, or other applications that use background data. But, we were pretty happy with the amount of time the Xperia could keep going for.

The Xperia Ray, like other Sony Ericsson handsets comes with a few nods to its coporate overlords. And to be honest, as with all Sony's ventures, it's here things go a little lame.

There are apps for Sony's streaming and download service for both music and movies. Both seem to work fine, but a movie - I Am Number Four - costs £12 to buy, in standard definition. That's actually more than it costs on DVD, to have it on a phone with a tiny screen. Laughable, it really is.

The Music Unlimited app is a bit of a faff too. Firstly, it's not installed, you click its logo and you have to go to a web page, which then sends you on to the Android Market. This is traditional big corporation thinking here, and it's every bit as annoying as always. Once you download and install it, the app is much like, say, Spotify. It lets you stream music over the Internet, direct to your phone. You do have to pay a monthly subscription for that though. All-in-all, we suggest getting music from Amazon. It's much cheaper, and less confusing.

There is one bright spot though. Sony also includes TrackID, which is a piece of software that can help you identify a song, and then buy it. It works with the built-in radio too, so you can find out what music you like without having to wait for a DJ to mention it - which they never do anyway. We tried this software a few times, and it never failed. Very cool indeed.