After a long time, I bought a brand new mobile phone for none other than myself. It had been a very long wait. A wait for atleast 6 months. The last time I bought a phone for myself was in early 2009. Then I bought five different phones for my family members, but not for me.
There were plenty of devices to consider, from the beautiful Nokia Lumia 800 to the mighty Samsung Galaxy Note. But the price factor was there to consider and the functionality I needed. I wanted my phone to be like me, not a very big or extremely power hungry. It just needed to fulfill the tasks I let it to do. And it should be future proof for atleast 1 and half year, till I need to buy my next phone. Regarding the facts, there remains very few choices. Sammy Galaxy S, HTC Wildfire, Motorola Defy and SE Ray and Neo V. And there were Nokia symbian series, which were not desirable at all. And I personally prefer SE for their looks and user interface.
This xperia neo V fulfills almost every criteria that I set. It had a decent screen size, not very big but extremely useful for watching movies and to type little everyday notes. A bigger screen would have helped more but it would require more space. Bigger screens need bigger pockets and for a person like me with not so big hands they would look odd. There screen size is perfect for me. It's easy to navigate by one hand in emergency, cause the thumb can reach the whole screen. So in terms of usability the size is as perfect as it could be.
The phone ships with Android 2.3.4 on board and that's the primary reason why I chose this over Galaxy S. And it has a 1 GHz processor which is better than the 600 MHz one of the HTC Wildfire. It is though not the front runner in the game of improving processors, it can handle everyday tasks smoothly and effectively.
It's a known fact that htc has the best UI in the Android family. But in my point of view SE comes a close second. Here I had to make some adjustments, but I do not regret for that. SE provides a decent interface and the timescape as an app is great. I found myself using it very often for my social networking. By default, it has facebook, twitter, call and sms listed. There are plenty of apps for timescape available in the android market. I myself loaded the gmail app and it's working like a charm. Also the menu system and the five home screen looks dazzling specially when live wallpapers are set, though they sucks the battery more. The app menu can be arranged by different order, like own order, or the installed last are shown first etc. Editing the menu is also very easy as well as finding the desired menu. The settings app comes handy when dealing with the running apps. The media player is good looking, though I haven't use the video player very much till now. The gallery has different menu styles too with 3D style or plain grid style. Overall using the device is very easy and requires little effort to learn the new things when migrating from a different operating system.
There is a office suite preloaded in this phone which can be used as a document viewer, sadly to edit or creat new documents the preloaded app needed to get upgraded. But android market comes handy by providing free office suit through downloads. A built in adobe reader comes handy in viewing PDF documents. I.viewed pretty large documents and there was no lag. Apps like Facebook, twitter are built in and they can be used from deep within. Sharing via facebook from anywhere on the mobile is a breeze thanks to the facebook in xperia feature. Overall in terms of built in features the phone is not very good as a full fledged office suit was a necessity for me. But that point was solved.
The phone comes with a 5 megapixel camera and a VGA camera at the front for video calls or self imaging. Both the cameras did their job decently and I have no regret. The SE Ray has a 8 megapixel camera but it had a smaller screen which is not very easy for typing. And as a regular user I don't usually shoot videos a lot, and when I needed I have a handycam for those tasks. Actually, I wonder how many people would use their mobile phones for capturing serious video? This phone packs a good 720p video capturing camera which is more than sufficient.
I often need to type some as I write blogs, and this mobile being an android one, is compatible to WordPress or blogger apps. The QWERTY keypad in portrait mode is ok, but in landscape mode the full QWERTY keypad is awesome. SE also has a very good supportive software to make typing easy. It is called predictive text input. A separate toolbar appears above the four row keypad showing the most appropriate words and can be chosen from them. Though sometimes it gets annoying but I found it extremely useful. Blogging is as easy as it was on any desktop.
Overall, in my point of view, this phone is the best for me right now. Sony Ericsson has made a great phone and I am very happy with this piece of mine.
