Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray Android smartphone

Snap happy

You can arrange your apps and shortcuts into different categories and another new trick is the ability to display all your widgets on a single screen when you pinch to zoom from one of the five home screens. Shake the phone and they’ll bounce around, over and under each other, which is a neat trick, but it doesn’t always make it easy to select the one you want.

Video capture is 720p and there's an on-board clips editor

The Timescape widget is back and helps you to keep up with your social networking commitments by combining them all, along with your emails and texts, into a single scrollable stream. The Data Monitor app can be set as a widget on your home screen and keeps track of how much data you’ve been using – you can set an alarm to let you know when you’re approaching your contract’s monthly limit.

The 1GHz processor is backed up by an Adreno 205 graphics chip and 512MB of RAM. It’s not as fast as the top performers, but this is still a nippy little phone, switching between apps quickly and handling movies, games and internet browsing with ease. It scored 1723 in the Quadrant Standard benchmark test, putting it up there with some of the best single-core handsets around.

The 8.1Mp camera includes LED flash, auto-focus, face detection, touch focus, image stabilisation, red-eye reduction and face detection. There’s no dedicated camera shutter button though – you take a pic by pressing the screen.

Sample Shots

Click for a full-resolution image

Click for a full-resolution image

Click for a full-resolution image

Like a few higher end Sony Ericssons of recent months, the Ray’s camera comes with Sony’s Exmor R for Mobile sensor, which does a good job of enabling you to take good pics in fairly dim lighting conditions. Overall picture quality is good, though the automatic sensor can struggle with bright sunlight. The digital zoom goes all the way up to 16x, though the quality of the image diminishes markedly at around half that.