Stylish Head Turner That's Adequately Powerful

The Good + Very attractive design + Swype functionality offers a quick way to type + Impressive screen + Powerful camera bundled with a great deal of premium functions + Very long battery life

The Bad - Decision to go with a single-core processor is a little short-sighted – Lacks a front-facing camera

Unequivocally sleek and rich in features, this latest offer from Sony Ericsson is an expression of wondrous technical wizardry in unmatched beauty. An improved processor breathes new life into the inchoate functionalities pioneered by its predecessor while a pinch of handy software updates drive enhancements into the well worked features. The Xperia Arc S may not have impressed perfection with a few questionable hiccups but it remains a fine suitor for anyone in the hunt for a stylish head turner that’s adequately powerful.

The Xperia Arc S is less confused with contemporary handset blueprints and more enthusiastic with a curvilinear base which marks an inspired departure from the tired oblong architecture. Our review model arrived in a lustrous white finish nattily dressed in a shiny silver trim that runs around the side profile of the smartphone. The handset sports a reasonable plastic build but the material runs an exquisite polish that easily permits the Xperia Arc S to elicit a measured expensive feel. At just 8.7mm at its thinnest point, the smartphone turns in as one of the slimmest. If the handset market is won with looks, the Xperia Arc S would have already beaten the competition.

As it is, the crowded smartphone market also stays perched on technology. The Xperia Arc S corners this department with a 1.4GHz chip and 512MB of RAM. The handset lacks the capacity of its dual-core competitors like the Samsung Galaxy S2 and HTC Sensation XE but speedy responses ensure that the omission is barely missed. In my tests, the Xperia Arc S only started to wobble after I opened a lattice of apps, putting a game on hold while browsing the web and updating my Facebook status, in addition to receiving notifications. The 1.4GHz processor is perfectly sufficient for normal use but I wonder if Sony Ericsson could have equipped the Xperia Arc S with a dual-core workhorse to better insure the device for the future.

Elsewhere, the Xperia Arc S performs with sparkles to quickly expunge worries. Shipped with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and the Swype ‘swipe to type’ functionality pre-installed, the Xperia Arc S is a blissful confluence of convenience and intuitiveness. Personally, I found the keys on the virtual keyboard too small as opposed to the ones on my iPhone 4 which often caused my thumb to miss the mark when trying to hit a specific alphabet. Swype offers a neater solution to this than the outmoded alphanumeric keypad which I did not want to get back to, picking letters out as you slide your finger from key to key. A helpful blue line traces your way so it’s easy to see which keys you’re bumping on. Sony Ericsson has also confirmed that it will roll the recently released Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out to the Xperia Arc S in late March 2012 so the software on the device can only be poised to become more attractive.

That attraction is spread over a 4.2-inch display that clocks in at 854 X 480 of resolution. Under the hood of the device is Sony’s Mobile Bravia Engine which helps push sharp detail and vivid colour on the LED-backlit LCD screen. Couple that with the generous real estate the screen provides and the pleasure which comes with viewing videos and photos on the Xperia Arc S is of little surprise. The smartphone comes with a thoughtful HDMI port at the top so there’s always the option of sharing the content on your HDTV though you have to get the HDMI cables separately. Unfortunately, the ill decision to exclude a front-facing camera is a little careless, if entirely tardy in response to modern smartphone trends.

Sony’s expertise in consumer electronics also manages to lend its shine to the camera on the Xperia Arc S and it shows. Constructed around the Exmor R CMOS sensor, the 8.1 megapixel shooter is a marvel, boasting technologies once limited to dedicated cameras like autofocus and face detection. If you’re more comfortable with manual focus, you would be hard pressed to find any hassle as the Xperia Arc S employs an impressive 2-touch mechanism that allows you to focus first by tapping gently on the desired portion of the to-be photo before pressing harder down on the screen to capture the shot.

Another noteworthy find is the smile detection feature which convinces the camera to automatically click away when it detects a smile, essentially eliminating the need for any command when you want to take a shot of your friends cheering while watching a football match. A host of other functions headline the camera, including the ability to take panoramic shots in both 2D and 3D. You can switch exposure and white balance, toggle the image stabiliser and capture videos at 720p HD as well. Feel free to check the demo photos out for the quality of shots taken with the device.

The Xperia Arc S has a battery life rated at 7 hours of talktime. In my tests, I observed that the handset lasted more than 24 hours each time although I browsed the web for more than an hour, spent bouts of my time on Facebook and WhatsApp, and occupied a small portion of the day with phone chats. That’s a massive volume of juice for today’s smartphones by any standard so there’s little need to worry if you’ve forgotten to bring your charger out with you. Sony Ericsson also crams tons of pre-installed apps on the Xperia Arc S, among them Let’s Golf and TrackID, the latter of which allows you to pull information on a song when you record it from any source. If there’s a point to nitpick, it’d be the 320MB of onboard memory but the package comes with a 8GB micro SD card with an option for expansion of up to 32GB.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S is now available at all major telcos and authorised resellers for $788 (without contract).

If you prefer a sport-centric phone, don't forget to check out our review of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active HERE.

Review by Loh Yong Jian