Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S (Unlocked)

Unlocked smartphones don't get much love in the U.S. thanks to their unsubsidized (read: high) up-front prices. But the Sony Xperia Arc S ($499.99) is still worth a look, particularly if you're fond of Sony's attention to detail and emphasis on multimedia playback. It's a fine music and video player, makes quick work of Android apps and the Web, and doesn't take up much room in your pocket, either. It's a good buy for AT&T subscribers who don't want to lock themselves into a contract.

Design and Call Quality
Most touch-screen slabs look alike when powered off, but the Xperia Arc S has a few nice design touches that distinguish it from the pack. My test unit was made of glossy black plastic, but you can also get one in white, silver, dark blue, or pink. It measures 4.9 by 2.5 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.1 ounces. Sony lists the phone as being 0.34 inches thick, but that's a slight misrepresentation, as there's both a gentle curve to the design as well as a slight thickening at the edges. Sit it next to an iPhone 4 (0.37 inches), and the Sony is thicker.

The expansive 4.2-inch, 480-by-854-pixel glass touch screen looks sharp and vibrant, and it's large enough that I had no trouble typing in either portrait or landscape mode. Considering the size of the screen, this is a small, lightweight smartphone, and an antidote to the big honking Android monsters currently in vogue. One minor demerit: The volume rocker switch and the camera shortcut buttons are tiny and sharp-edged, although they're easy enough to locate without looking.

The Xperia Arc S is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and tri-band HSPA+ 14.4 (850/1900/2100 MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. That means it's compatible with AT&T and overseas 3G bands, but not T-Mobile's. Call quality was excellent, with a clear, bright tone in the earpiece and plenty of available volume. Transmissions through the mic were also clear, although the Xperia Arc S let through a small amount of street noise. Reception was fine.

Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars). Voice dialing was hopeless; it triggered over Bluetooth but never heard any of my test numbers correctly. The speakerphone went surprisingly loud for a thin phone, and with little distortion. Battery life was a disappointment at just 4 hours and 35 minutes of talk time.

User Interface and Apps
Out of the box, the Xperia Arc S runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), but Sony deserves kudos for being the only major smartphone manufacturer to promise Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) updates for all of its 2011 and 2012 smartphones by the middle of this year.

Sony's UI layer is easy to like, even if you normally prefer stock Android. The home screens and menu panels glide smoothly as you swipe between them. Hold down the menu icon for a moment, and all the icons will wiggle, indicating you can customize the app drawer itself as well as drop icons on the home screens. Contacts get huge photos, and the dialer adds redial shortcuts to each entry in the call log.

Otherwise, all of the usual Android benefits are here, including free Google Maps Navigation for voice-enabled GPS, a powerful WebKit browser, and access to hundreds of thousands of apps in Android Market. The 1.4GHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S2 MSM8255 processor is no longer state of the art, but it gets the job done for regular tasks. Low frame rates in our benchmark tests signaled the Xperia Arc S isn't much of a gaming phone, though.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack, 8GB microSD card, and included Sony earbuds make the Xperia Arc S a fine music player right out of the box. My 32GB SanDisk card worked fine, but you have to pull the battery to swap cards, which is annoying. There's also 294MB of free internal storage. Music tracks sounded fine through Samsung Modus HM6450 Bluetooth headphones ($99, 4 stars), and quite good through the included wired stereo pair of earbuds, with impressive bass extension.

The music player app rocks; it lets you drag and drop tracks to make playlists with one tap from the main screen, and you can search Google for lyrics, Wikipedia for artist info, and music and karaoke videos on YouTube for the current song. Standalone videos fared well as long as I stuck with 720p MP4 and H.264 files. DivX and XviD files were out, and so was anything encoded in 1080p. A covered mini-HDMI port on top lets you output video to a TV, although there's no cable included with the phone.

The 8.1-megapixel auto-focus camera features face recognition, smile detection, geotagging, and an LED flash. There's no front-facing camera, a strange omission. Test photos looked good, and about average for this class of sensor, with impressive detail. Images had some light balance issues and a slightly washed-out look, but otherwise it's a good stand-in for a point-and-shoot. Recorded 1280-by-720-pixel (720p) videos looked sharp and played smoothly at 29 frames per second, and the image stabilization feature is welcome.

If you want something that looks sharp, travels light, and lets you use any SIM card you want, the Xperia Arc S is a solid buy. That said, the Samsung Galaxy S II ($799, 4 stars) remains our Editors' Choice for unlocked smartphones, thanks to its dual-core processor, superior battery life, and much faster HSPA+ 21 data speeds. Granted, the Sony Xperia Arc S retails for a whopping $300 less than the Galaxy S II, but street prices are much closer now that the Galaxy S II has been out for a few months. If you want a keyboard, the unlocked version of the Samsung Captivate Glide ($599.99, 4 stars) is also available; we awarded the subsidized AT&T version Editors' Choice award for keyboarded smartphones.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 35 minutes

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