The bottom line: The Xperia ray is a good-looking handset with a capable camera and a great display. It's a shame it's may just be too small a smartphone for most men.
Announced back in June at CommunicAsia 2011 and currently available for sale, the Xperia ray smartphone is quite slim at just 9.4mm thin. It comes packing Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and features a 8.1-megapixel camera.If you like the Xperia arc, we have good news for you. The Xperia ray looks and feels like a smaller version, just without the curved back of the arc. Build-wise, the phone feels solid in our hands. It comes in three colors--black, gold and pink.
At 111 x 53mm, the ray is quite small in our hands. This appearance is reinforced with the 3.3-inch display, which features a resolution of 854 x 480 pixels. This is the same number of pixels as you'll find on the larger 4.2-inch Xperia arc. The smaller screen size of the ray means it has a higher pixels-per-inch density of 297ppi.
Like the arc, the ray also comes with Sony's "Reality display with Mobile Bravia Engine". While this is mainly marketing jargon, we did find images looking vibrant and fonts appearing both crisp and clear on the screen.
Located below the display are three buttons--two touch sensitive keys for Back and Menu, and a physical Home button. Volume controls are located on the right edge, and they also allow you to control the camera's digital zoom. On the top is where you'll find the 3.5mm audio connector and the power switch. Located on the right side is where you'll find the micro-USB charging port.
Rounding things up is the 8.1-megapixel camera with an LED photo light found on the back of the ray. Unlike a flash, the photo light continuously shines a light at your subject, which can be quite glaring. The camera features an aperture of F2.4, which should allow faster shutter speeds and action shots. There's also a front-facing VGA camera for videoconferencing. Located on the back of the ray is a second microphone for the noise-canceling feature.
Removing the rear cover will reveal the 1,500mAh battery as well as the SIM and microSD slots. Unlike some of the other smartphones, the Xperia ray doesn't support hotswapping, so you will have to take the battery out if you want to change your microSD card.
The ray packs in most of the connectivity features that you would expect from an Android device. These include HSPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS. It also has a built-in FM radio, handy for the morning commute.There are also plenty of customizations done to the Gingerbread OS like in the arc. This includes the Timescape widget, which collects your SMSes, Twitter and Facebook updates in one place. There's also a new Facebook Inside Xperia feature, which allows for deeper integration with your contacts, and also for sharing and viewing media from the social networking site. You can also drag an app on top of another to create a folder like in iOS.
While there's plenty to like about the ray, the small 3.3-inch screen makes it hard to use with our fat sausage fingers. While Sony has implemented a keypad solution for typing, we found it inferior to the normal QWERTY layout. The QWERTY keyboard is just too small to use while in portrait mode, so unless you have tiny fingers or are of the fairer sex (who generally have smaller hands), the phone may be a pain to use.
Pictures taken with the 8.1-megapixel camera tend to be pretty vibrant. As mentioned earlier, shutter speeds were snappy, and the phone sports a backside-illuminated sensor (BSI). The smartphone also works well in low-light conditions. Thanks to the BSI, we found that the images have very low noise levels. The automatic settings tend to work fine, but you'll want to manually set the macro mode for better closeup shots.
Battery life was surprisingly great, with the phone lasting almost two days on a single charge. Testing was done with two Gmail accounts and Twitter on push, while our Facebook app set on a two hour sync together with the occasional calls, text messaging and light browsing.
We had no issues with call quality, and did not experience any dropped calls during our test period. The noise cancellation feature seemed to work fine when we were at a noisy store. The surprising feature of the phone has to be the ray's impressively loud speakers, which you'll have no problem hearing even when kept in a pocket or handbag.