Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S review

The Arc S’s camera hasn’t changed from the original Arc’s which is no bad thing. Shots are crisp and colours are natural, but some light areas were over-exposed. We were impressed by the dark and noise-free black areas, though. Video was less impressive, with obvious blurry artefacts from compression.

The camera has a new 3D panorama feature, where you take a panorama shot by panning the camera while shooting, and the Arc S then compresses this into a 3D side-by-side image. You then plug into a 3D TV via HDMI and use the TV’s remote control to browse the phone’s photo gallery. When displayed on a 3D monitor, the 3D panoramic images were fuzzy, and we found we needed to be careful with our viewing position and force our eyes to focus on infinity to see the 3D effect. It feels like a gimmick, and isn’t a reason to buy the Arc S on its own.

Our Vodafone sample came with Vodafone’s own shop apps for music, apps and games, but these can be uninstalled if you don’t want them. You can also delete some of the trial games and other preinstalled apps, to free up space for your own choices. Sony Ericsson claims there’s only 320MB of the 1GB of user memory left for apps, once we’d uninstalled a few of the pre-installed apps and moved others to the SD card, we ended up with 420MB of total app storage. This is more than enough for most users, and it’ll be a while before you run out of app space.

While the Arc S isn’t a worthwhile upgrade for Arc owners, it’s a great Android phone with a clear, bright screen and a good camera, with enough power to run apps and games, decent battery life and plenty of storage. It’s now cheaper SIM-free than the original Arc and has better battery life, so it picks up and extra star and a Best Buy award.