Power comes in all sizes.
Pressing the keys, I wasn’t greeted with the enthusiastic clicks I was expecting, on say a BlackBerry Bold 9900 or Nokia E6 keyboard, but rather a dull depression followed by a muffled tick. I honestly wished Sony Ericsson had used proper clicky keys for the Xperia Mini Pro, because as the keyboard stands right now, I just don’t feel excited to use it.
Don’t get me wrong, the keyboard is just as fast to use as any other QWERTY based phone, but to me it doesn’t ‘feel right’. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on personal preference; just try it out in a showroom before buying it. The second thing that was troublesome was that every time I used the keyboard for more than 5 minutes, my thumbs would start aching. This isn’t a problem that I have experienced with BlackBerry or other similarly shaped smartphones. I guess the center of balance is a little top heavy when the keyboard is slid out, which puts more pressure. Once again, you mileage may vary depending on your hand size.
So that’s enough about the outside, let’s talk about what the Xperia Mini Pro packs inside such a miniscule body. The Android Gingerbread powered smartphone runs on a 1GHz Scorpion CPU with a Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset and an Adreno 205 GPU. 512MB of RAM is enough for multitasking, with 400MB ROM. Our test version, which seems like what will be shipped as the retail boxes as well, will be packed with a 2GB MicroSD card for internal storage, expandable up to 32GB.
Sadly the Mini Pro doesn’t feature the same 8MP camera of the Xperia Ray, but given the small body and 3” screen with a resolution of just 320×480 pixels, I guess the 5MP camera will suffice. Still, it’s good enough to capture videos in 720p at 30fps. There’s also an LED flash at the back to brighten things up; nothing spectacular. I suppose being AED 500 less than the Ray certainly means cuts from some place, and I would rather it be a camera than the processing power which would have made the daily use of the phone uncomfortable.
