I am writing this post in English for all Xperia arc fans visitors from XDA Developers forum as well as for all my English speaking friends that requested me several times to start posting in English as well. Ok, I am using Xperia Arc for almost one month already and I think it was enough time for me to have a good and clear idea about the phone.

1. Battery: Xperia Arc comes with BA750 battery (1500 mAh) that keeps the phone up and running for a full day even with the heaviest usage. I succeeded to consume the battery before the end on the day only once when I’ve been to the Scorpions concert (recording more than one hour of 720p HD video and taking more than 100 pictures, you can see some samples in my previous posts). Normally I keep the phone with data and Wi-Fi connection all day having Active sync client (Moxier mail) active, sometimes I activate also GPS (for 30-60 minutes/day) and I am a normal voice and SMS user. At the end of the day the battery it is still at 50%

2. Camera: Arc is having the best phone camera I ever seen until today, it has 8.1 megapixels Exmor sensor and can record 720p HD video at 30 fps. The built in LED flash can help shoot quite good quality pictures in low light conditions. The quality of the pictures and the videos taken can be easily seen in my previous posts. What is really amazing is the speed you can shoot pictures: at least one every second!

3. Screen: maybe not the best screen available on the market but for sure the quality of the 4.1’ screen of Xperia Arc is much above the average and you can watch high quality movies using BRAVIA technology. Xperia Arc comes with an HDMI connector and cable that can connect the phone to the TV set with HDMI being able to control the phone with the TV remote when playing content on TV.

4. Software: the phone came initially with Android 2.3.2 but only after few days it got the 2.3.3 update so this time it seems that Sony Ericsson learned the lesson with Xperia X10 and they realized that if they want to stay on the market they need to keep the pace with competition and with latest software improvements. The Launcher application is good and is coming with some nice widgets (best one is the photo widget – you can scroll the pictures directly on the screen without opening the photo gallery; the music widget is also similar).

5. Speed: although the phone is not having a dual core processor like most of the new smart phones, Arc is fast; it is much faster than his predecessor Xperia X10 and only few applications (Firefox is killing even my PC sometimes with its memory needs) that I installed made it laggy sometimes. All other applications runs just perfectly.

What I don’t like:

• unlock slide it’s to low on the screen, you need to install a better unlock application to personalize it
• power button is to difficult to operate/press
• I have dark blue version and the plastic cover looks a bit cheap. Silver version is much better
• Xperia Arc is having only 1GHz single core processor and only 384 MB internal memory

Few weeks ago Tech Radar was ranking Xperia Arc best phone in the world (now it is still number three, and if you ask me it went down 2 positions just because it doesn’t have the 1.2 dual core processor and more internal memory). Overall Sony Ericsson made great progresses comparing with the predecessor X10 in all areas. Probably Arc (together with the new series of phones launched recently, Play, Neo, Pro) will keep them between the top mobile phone manufacturers, although this year Sony (one of the parent companies) is having big financial difficulties and not only.