Sitting pretty in the hand, the small Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo smartphone and its 8.1-megapixel camera offer photographic skills far beyond what you'd expect for its 125g weight.
The 3.7-inch screen with multi-touch Reality display is nice and sharp, and benefits colour-wise from Mobile Bravia technology. However it fares poorly in direct sunlight, with us having to pull the ol' hand-as-a-sun-blocker move.
The phone is small enough to use comfortably with one hand, so it's not a huge problem, but essentially, with smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S2 carrying AMOLED and the Apple iPhone 4 with its Retina display technology, should we really be having problems with direct sunlight any more?
You can check out our Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo video review too - it's like a written review but with moving pictures:
But, moving on, the (blue for us) semi-anodised finish, curved posterior and well-distributed weighting means it sits nicely in the hand at least.
The lock/power key, volume rocker, and – score! – a soft camera key all live on the silver right side of the 13mm-thick chassis. It's not the thinnest of phones, but the depth gives it a nice solid feel in the palm, and it's short enough (4.7 inches, or 116mm) to slip easily into pockets.
On the front we have the Home, Menu and Back buttons, plus up top the Xperia Neo squeezes in a front-facing camera, and proximity and light sensors.
On the back, of course, we have aforementioned 8.1-megapixel camera and a beast of a flash, with which we may have blinded some unsuspecting band members at gigs. Whoops.
Placed at the top are the mini-USB port, 3.5mm audio jack and – in keeping with the high megapixel camera – a mini-HDMI port.
All in, we're not faced with yet another black slab of a smartphone, which is good, we suppose. It's neat and ergonomic, but it's not the sexiest design ever and doesn't really push our aesthetics buttons.
Coming in SIM-free at around £369, it's a mid-range smartphone that fits a lot into its small frame. Running on Gingerbread 2.3, there's also the 8MP camera, mini-HDMI out should you enjoy seeing your videos on a big screen, and a multi-touch 3.7-inch screen.
The Xperia Neo definitely leans on its media offering, but for what it's worth, that's some pretty good stuff, and great if your smartphone is more for play than it is for work.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo runs on Android Gingerbread 2.3, neatly aligning it with the Samsung Galaxy S2 and earmarking it as one of the few handsets to be launched with the updated OS.
It offers a smooth navigation experience, with little-to-no juddering – in fact, the only stuttering we found was with internet browsing, but we'll get to that in a little while.
For customisation fans, the little Xperia Neo offers a plethora of possibilities, with five Home screens, moveable widgets and shortcuts, and – hello to Apple's iOS – the ability to organise all of them into folders.
Diving into the menu delivers the apps, the ordering of which is easy. Click on the right-hand squares icon and it floats the apps, making it easy to sort into content panels. Or, click on the left-hand arrow icon and sort them alphabetically, by most used or by most recently installed.
The Android pull-down notifications tab is still around, something we like as a handy way of viewing your most recent messages/notifications.
And for your four key, most-used apps, there's a dock across the bottom of each screen to pin them on. By default these sit as media, messaging, contacts and phone dialer, but they too can be customised and changed around.
Plus, holding the Home button momentarily will bring up a multitasking screen, which allows you to pick from the most recent apps you've had open.
Altogether, a good operating system overlaid with a Sony Ericsson skin, making for an easy to navigate UI that you can make your own in many ways.
Accessing the contacts is, as previously stated, easily done through the floating dock, which sits on every Home screen. They're, naturally, presented in the usual list, with a nice dash of social networking integration.
Syncing with your Twitter, Facebook and Google accounts will automatically populate your handset with imagery and the latest status update from whichever network your contacts happen to be connected to - a simple edit will also allow you to join Facebook, Twitter and Exchange contacts either manually or automatically if the names are similar.
Tapping a contact's name will bring up their profile page, displaying all their latest status updates, email addresses, and of course, phone number. From here you can make them a favourite, edit their info or shortcut to various messaging types (SMS, email, social networks etc).
However, if you want to skip all that, simply tap the image to the side of the name in the list view and up pops a handy row of shortcuts, including phone dialler, email, SMS, Facebook and Twitter.
You have to be quite precise in your tapping, however, because the list view keeps each contact defined to a thin strip, so there's a lot of room for error and might get irritating if you're larger of finger.
Adding a contact is dead easy. Long-tap an incoming number, or just dive into the contacts list, and tap 'create new contact', or the + icon that sits at the top of the screen.
Calling-wise, the connection tends to be good and doesn't often drop, but one bugbear is the lack of smart dialling. Finding a number means either dipping into the contacts or going through the call log. All well and good, but it's nice to have that short cut of being able to tap in representative numbers and be presented with matching names.
The handset sits comfortably against the ear thanks to the curved form, and call quality is loud and clear.
Knocking the volume up and down while talking can be a little difficult, since the volume rocker sits too close to the camera button to be able to feel the difference while talking. However, it's a minor fault. Having the call on speaker gives a decently loud sound.
Tapping out messages on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo is adequate. The keypad itself is well spaced and should be easy to pick up speed on, however there are a couple of notable faults.
There's a possibility whoever designed it has a problem with contractions, because the apostrophe button is irritatingly located in the symbols page, and typing in predictive text doesn't help either.
For example, typing "where's" won't offer the amendment "where's"; instead you have to navigate out of the QWERTY pad and into the symbols, and only upon typing "where'" will you be offered the choice of "where's".
Same for "I'm" and "I'd", and while it sounds like such a simple thing, it gets incredibly irritating after a while and drastically slows down responses.
That said, everything else is set up in a good way. There's a portrait and a landscape QWERTY pad.
And, standard Android, the choice to reply in portrait while seeing the message history and a shortened form of your message.
Or to reply in landscape without the message view but with a full screen message.
Converting the SMS to MMS is handy, with a shortcut sitting next to the text input box that, when pressed, offers the chance to add media or even dive into camera mode and add a new snap.
The message history format is the now-standard bubble view, however, with both sides of the conversation displayed in the same colour of bubble, it can get a little difficult to tell who is who if the conversation goes on for a while.
Social networking isn't really integrated at all in the SMS inbox, and the choice has been made to keep email and SMS inboxes separate. Messages in the inbox are displayed in a list view, however, and contacts' pictures as synced with Facebook/Twitter are visible.
As for email, the phone comes pre-loaded with two different apps; Gmail, plus a generic email app. The standard app refuses to acknowledge the existence of inbox folders, so that's not particularly useful if you're a super-organised person. But if you're both organised and on Gmail, then you're absolutely set. It does, however, have a combined inbox, which lets you add several accounts at once.
Additionally, the screen feels a little crowded when in the email editor, especially in portrait QWERTY mode.
However, setting up your account is beautifully simple, as it always is these days: simply enter your details to the prompt screens and away you go.
With a decent Wi-Fi or 3G (HSDPA, 7.2Mbps) signal, using the browser of internet-reliant apps is pretty fast, taking around a minute to send an image to a Twitter client such as PicPlz, for example.
Even image-heavy sites with Flash elements, such as TechRadar, were quick to load with a strong signal… otherwise, it's a couple of minutes wait to load a webpage or map.
The browser supports text reflow and colours are bright, though not always very sharp, with images becoming pixelated when zoomed in to read text.
The Sony Ericcson Xperia Neo supports Flash 10.1 and videos can be watched inside the browser without having to navigate out to say, the YouTube app, which is pretty sweet, though standard for Android (*cough*c'mon iPhone*cough*).
Navigating the browser is dead easy thanks to the usual Android Menu button, which means you can switch between open windows, going to the bookmarks page or add a bookmark with ease. It's also simple to share the page you're reading with your social networks.
Bookmarking is as easy as navigating; just click the menu key, dip into Bookmarks and you'll find all your favourite sites ordered by thumbnail, most visited and the general browser history.
The cherry on the decently-specced cake of the Xperia Neo has to be the camera. It packs an eight-megapixel Exmor R sensor to help brighten low-light images (which it genuinely does).
There's a Camera button to shortcut into the camera mode or to take images with. You already know how much these please us. You can, if you prefer, use touchscreen capture, but we think a physical button reduces shaking, so we're always pleased to see one.
There are precious few modes to play with on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo, and only one shooting mode that will allow you to zoom (2MP, 16:9), which is pretty poor. Post-shot editing is limited too to a simple crop or rotate.
But if post processing is really your thing, there's usually an app for that, so head to the decently stocked Market.
OUTDOORS: This snap of Brighton beach on a cloudy day is fairly true-to-life for colour, with a little saturation. The colour washes out slightly on the right towards the light source but is overall a great quality picture (taken at the highest resolution)
LOW LIGHT: This picture of Brighton pier lit up at dusk is significantly helped by the Exmor R sensor technology, because the sky was much, much darker than it appears in the image. Colours keep a beautiful tone. Snapped at dusk without flash
BLINDING: This image was taken in bright sunshine, and the camera doesn't fare very well when faced with a strong light source directly in front of it. The resulting image is almost black and white, drastically washed of colour and producing a silhouette effect
DETAIL: This pic of the London Eye in strong daylight is much better, with no saturation and true colours. The detailing is excellent
With the Neo video options, oddly enough, there's a little more to tweak than there is with the camera mode. You can play with the exposure, pick different scenes such as Sports or Night mode and choose from three focus settings.
It seems a little odd not to have these available for the camera too, but hey ho. A mini-HDMI port lets you connect to a big screen, but even watching the video playback on a laptop screen didn't wow us.
The footage is detailed to be sure, but it's not as sharp as the Nokia E7 and one of our examples shows that the microphone is susceptible to a noisy background. Shooting without the image stabiliser on also produces a somewhat jerky playback.
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