Sony Ericsson Xperia Active

The Good: The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active is dust resistant, water resistant and incorporates wet finger tracking which means; the phone works perfectly well when screen or finger is wet. It can also swim in up to 1 meter water depth for good half an hour. The smartphone has a sporty look and designed to be ruff-n-tuff.

The Bad: The smartphone feels plasticky, low resolution screen, poor video format support, plenty of Sony Ericsson spam apps installed.

Design: Rugged generally point out a sturdy, strong with extra muscle design. But the Xperia Active is not built with extra pounds but the phone looks attractive with a rubberized back with a silver rim along the sides. The rubberized finish guarantees the firm grip and it just weight 110.8 grams.

At front it sports 3 inch LED-Backlit LCD display with Bravia Mobile engine and a LED notification above it and no front facing camera. On the left hand side it has power button, volume rocker and the dedicated camera button on the right hand side. At bottom it has 3.5 mm slot and the micro USB port.

Processor and Operating System: It is powered by 1GHz Scorpion processor with Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset, 512 MB of RAM, Adreno 205 graphic processor unit and runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system (may get upgrade for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich).

Screen: It sports 3 inch LED-Backlit LCD display with Bravia Mobile engine which boost brighter and sharper images even in sunlight. The display also incorporates wet finger tracking which means; the phone works perfectly well when screen or finger is wet.

Camera: The Xperia Active comes with 5 mega pixel camera with LED flash and auto focus. The camera can capture image at 2592 x 2944 pixels of resolution and records video at 720p. Other camera features are touch focus, geo-tagging, face detection, image stabilization and there is no front facing camera.

Storage and Connectivity: The device comes with 1 GB internal memory but only 320 MB is available for users. The device also has a microSD card slot for expandable memory up to 32 GB.

Battery: The Xperia Active function on Li-Ion 1200 mAh standard battery which the company claims to offer up to 4 hours and 53 minutes of talk time on 2G and up to 5 hours and 31 minutes on 3G. It can offers music play up to 25 hours and standby time up to 351 hours and 335 hours on 2G and 3G respectively.

Wrap Up: The Sony Xperia Active is a nice little smartphone with good design. What we liked is its rugged nature and the sensitive touch screen which works well even when it is wet. Sadly it has a comparative low resolution screen of 320x480 pixels which means text and images aren’t as sharp as other Android smartphones.