Review: Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray

There are some times when you simply do not want to carry around a huge device like the HTC Sensation or Samsung Galaxy S II and you instead would like a more compact device to suit your needs. This is where the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray comes in to play: it's a compact, thin, mid-range device with a focus on media capabilities and still enough power behind it to make everything run smoothly.

Thanks to the guys over at MobiCity, today I have with me the European Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray ST18i model in black with 900/2100 3G HSPA bands, but rest assured that there is also a US model designed for those that need 850/1900/2100 bands. As always MobiCity managed to ship this device to me (in Australia) the day after I requested it, so props to them for quick shipping to Pacific countries.

Specifications

As I mentioned above there are two models of the Xperia Ray that differ in the 3G bands for different regions. Everything else about the two models is the same, including the Qualcomm MSM8255 chipset (1 GHz single-core Snapdragon with Adreno 205), impressive 8 MP camera for a mid-range device and pixel-packed 3.3-inch 480 x 854 display.

The battery in this device is also quite large at 1,500 mAh; this should be plenty considering it only needs to power a 3.3-inch display and moderate specs in this Android climate. The Ray also has a fantastically small footprint, which we will highlight in the next section on the design.

Contents

Don't want to read the whole review? Skip to the page you're interested in:

1. Introduction
2. Design and Display
3. Software
4. Performance
5. Camera
6. Media Playback & Call Quality
7. Video Overview
8. Battery Life & Conclusion

For those of you who don't want to read the entirety of the review, please also check out the video overview (on page 7) for a short rundown of all the features and some of the best parts of the device

Design

The biggest surprise for me when getting this device out of the packaging was the relatively tiny size compared to the Galaxy S that I use as my daily driver. The Xperia Ray fits width-wise into the 4-inch display on my Galaxy S, is considerably shorter in height and is half a millimetre thinner as well. Putting the two devices side by-side really shows off this difference in size.

The front of the Ray is occupied by the 3.3-inch display, front-facing camera and three buttons – two of which are capacitive and the third (the home button) is physical. Around the home button is a semicircle ring of light that turns on when you turn on the display, and also flashes colors for incoming notifications and charging; it’s a really handy and stylish way of performing the actions of a notification light.

The back of the device sees soft-touch plastic with branding, HD camera with LED flash, speaker (under the Sony Ericsson orb logo) and noise cancellation microphone. There are no unusual patterns or unnecessary colors on the back of the Xperia Ray, which leaves the device with a fitting minimalist feel. The inclusion of a matte cover also prevents nasty fingerprints.

Around the edges you see an exposed microUSB port on the left side, volume rocker on the right, power button and 3.5mm audio jack on the top and microphone on the bottom. The sides have attractive wedge-shaped metallic highlights that give the device the illusion that it’s thinner than it is.

I honestly cannot find anything to fault about the design of the Xperia Ray – it’s rock solid for a device of this size. It fits perfectly and comfortably in the hand, all buttons are in sensible and ergonomic positions and the minimalist, squared Xperia design feels right in with other designs of this era and doesn’t feel dated whatsoever. 

Display

The display on the Xperia Ray is certainly worth a mention, mostly due to the high-density of pixels present. The device packs a 3.3-inch 480 x 854 LED-backlit LCD “Reality Display” with an approximate pixel density of 297 ppi (pixels per inch); very close to the iPhone 4 “Retina” display’s 330 ppi.

The Ray’s display is absolutely gorgeous. For a non-AMOLED display, colors really seem to be vibrant and very true to reality. Pictures and videos look fantastic on the display thanks to the Sony Bravia Mobile engine that enhances the quality of imagery, and you don’t get any blue tinting on white areas like you would on a Super AMOLED.

Below is a comparison of the two types of displays. The Ray’s display (the smaller one) has the best true-to-reality color toning of the two and the better clarity (although this photo doesn’t really illustrate the difference). I still prefer the Super AMOLED for its overall vibrancy, but the Ray has one of the best mobile LCD displays available.

Of course, as with all LCD displays, black levels and viewing angles are not nearly as good as on the AMOLED type, but they’re not bad by any means on the Ray’s LED-backlit display. Viewing angles are better than what I have seen on HTC devices, but black levels don’t look as good as they did on the HTC Sensation, for example. Also, the lack of auto-brightness means that black levels can look worse when the display is too bright.

There is no doubting the benefits to the high pixel count. Most of the time individual pixels are indistinguishable on the Ray’s display and take close inspection to find. This allows text to be readable while very small; the Neowin desktop homepage is perfectly readable at a size where it is slightly blurred on the Galaxy S’ lower density display.

At times the text can be annoyingly small in applications as they are designed to be used on larger displays, but for the most part the display is the best I have seen on a device of this size. Going back to using a 3.2” 320 x 480 display on my aging HTC Hero just seems terrible in comparison to what Sony Ericsson have conjured up to put in the Ray.

Software

Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” along with Sony Ericsson’s own Timescape UI is the OS and skin combination behind the Xperia Ray. As you would expect, the Timescape UI has taken the stock Android feel and “enhanced” it by changing the interface in a lot of the apps while also adding functionality and even including some new apps.

The home and launcher applications found on the Xperia Ray are pretty standard. You get a total of five homescreens and a dock of five icons, four of which are apps and are completely interchangeable. The launcher is incredibly smooth to use and is complete with great animations that spice up interaction around the interface. It also comes with a great array of glassy widgets that fit right in with the rest of the theme.

The lockscreen is your standard skinned Android one with the slide right to unlock and slide left to change your speaker settings. The time is very prominent, making it easy to quickly check it from straight out of your pocket. The lockscreen displays notifications for when you receive messages, but apart from that there are no other cool integrations such as quick app launchers or music player widgets.

The app launcher is another great part of the interface as it allows you to sort your apps in a variety of different ways including your own custom order. Not only that, but there is any easy button that allows you to easily uninstall your downloaded applications – something I haven’t seen before and something that would be really useful in other custom app launchers.

Some of the apps included with the interface are basic skins of stock Android apps, including the Browser, Calculator, Clock and Calendar. No new functionality was added to these apps and all of them function perfectly fine as they would in a vanilla Android installation, so I’m not going to go into any detail on them. It’s the other apps that are of interest.

One of the apps of interest is the Timescape app, and the social integration that is present around the Timescape UI. The actual Timescape app is a collection of all the interactions between you and your contacts, whether that be messages, phone calls, Facebook posts or tweets. These are presented in a flowing 3D pane interface, which if you tap on any of the panes brings you to a more focused interface, and then finally to the related app to view more.

When setting up Timescape’s social integration it also links itself into several other apps, such as the Contacts, Music and TrackID (music identification) apps. Some of the social features, such as liking the tracks you listen to, are quite pointless and will just spam your friends, but others such as the photo integration into Contacts are very useful. Not only that, but the actual Timescape app allows you to easily see all the latest information from your friends in the one area; a surprisingly good move from Sony.

The messaging app improves upon, visually, the stock Android messaging app. It is accompanied by nice animations and a very easy to read speech-bubble-style message timeline which hides irrelevant information where appropriate. When sending a message you can easily add media in thanks to the prominent button, but of course this will turn it into an MMS and cost you more.

One of the downsides of having only a 3.3-inch display is that the keyboard becomes tougher to use in portrait mode, compared to 3.7” and 4” displays. While typing I often hit other keys accidentally and my overall typing speed was slower than on my Galaxy S. At times it felt like I was hitting keys and it was registering the wrong key, even on the larger landscape keyboard, which makes typing unfortunately harder than it should be.

The Gallery app continues the trend of social integration as it automatically includes all the photos you have uploaded to Facebook into the stock Android interface, and while it doesn’t download the photos to your phone it allows easy access to your online photos. I thought that Sony Ericsson might include their own Timescape-style app for viewing photos and videos but they must have thought the stock Android one was good enough.

Finally, the most outstanding app that comes with the Xperia Ray is the music app. Not only is it very visually appealing, smooth and full-featured, it also allows the quick lookup of information related to the song you’re listening to. You can find the lyrics of the song, music videos and artist information through a quick press of the infinity button – and if you so desire you can like the song on Facebook.

Even without carrier branding there are still loads of spam and useless apps loaded on the Xperia Ray. You have three apps that link to the Market (Get Games, Get Apps and Xperia Hot Shots), three web portals (UEFA.com, Store and Sync), a mediocre music identifier called TrackID, basic office app OfficeSuite (free version) and a couple of mildly useful apps relating to the phone’s functions. It’s disappointing to see so much spam on the device but I guess you don’t have to use them.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that the Timescape UI included on the Xperia Ray is amazing, but it isn’t terrible and some inclusions are visually and feature-wise better than their stock Android counterparts. The Music and Timescape apps are the highlights of the interface, but apart from that Sony Ericsson haven’t done anything particularly innovative with the Android look and feel.

Performance

My experience using the Xperia Ray was very smooth despite the moderate specs that power the device. With dual-core processors taking the top-end range of smartphones and tablets, single core chipsets such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 now make up part of the mid-range despite powering relatively recent devices such as the Desire S and Xperia Play.

Still, the MSM8255 with a 1GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 and 512 MB of RAM seem to be right at home in the mid-range Xperia Ray. The interface is outstandingly smooth to the point that I didn’t experience lag at all while using any of the included apps, so Sony Ericsson must have taken the specs they had and optimized their interface accordingly.

The browser is no slouch either, easily rendering massive web pages with lots of graphics such as Engadget and The BBC, however sometimes panning and zooming would stutter where a dual-core would not. For everyday usage from a mid-range phone this is fine though, and for the price range that this device fills you couldn’t really ask for much better.

Gaming-wise the games that you would expect to play on such a device run perfectly fine. Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, Guerrilla Bob, EVAC HD, Apparatus were just some of the games I tried that were smooth, responsive and fine to play. The more intensive games such as Dungeon Defenders struggled on the Xperia Ray, but the screen is really too small to be playing hardcore games like this anyway.

In the two synthetic benchmarks I used, SmartBench 2011 (Productivity score) for CPU and RAM testing and GLBenchmark 2.1 for GPU testing, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray fell right about where I expected it to.

In Smartbench 2011 the Ray scored around 1000, which is what the other MSM8255 devices scored in this department, and lower than the HTC Flyer with its 1.4 GHz processor. It was no match for the faster dual-core devices at the top.

When it came to GLBenchmark 2.1, the Ray came very close to parity with the Galaxy S in the Egypt test, but in the PRO test it got dominated by devices with faster GPUs.

Camera

The camera on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is absolutely outstanding for a mid-range device. You get a rear 8-megapixel camera with LED light and autofocus, and a front-facing VGA camera. Obviously the latter of the two cameras is not going to be particularly outstanding, but the former is so good it could replace a standalone point-and-shoot with no complaints.

There are two factors that make this camera so amazing: the low-light performance, which I’ll mention later, and amount of control you have over your shots. When it comes to control of the camera, you can pretty much do anything you please.

As always there is the basic LED control, resolution, scene and geotagging, but you also get full focus control (including face detection), exposure, white balance, metering and stabilization controls – resulting in great photos from manual control of the settings. It also can take shots very quickly as it focuses constantly while in the camera app, meaning when you touch the screen you are ready to instantly take a shot.

To make it even better, many of these settings carry over to the video mode as well, so you can have full control over how your videos are shot. While the video quality (below) isn’t as good as the photo quality, you can still shoot in 720p with crisp enough images and strong audio – and if you so desire you can have face detection and the rear light on while you take your video.

Focus quality (test shots below) is great, with the Ray focusing quickly on wide shots and having the ability to focus as close as 6 cm to the subject. As a result photos of text and flowers appear fantastic.

Wide shots (test shot below) have better color tone and slightly better crispness than what I have seen on other mobile cameras. You get 8 MP shots which when scaled down to 1080p look sharp; however when looking at a 100% crop the crispness dies away and some blurring is prevalent.

Color quality is remarkably correct (test shots below), especially when under a harsh Australian sun. When taking images that involve a lot of color, the images are not oversaturated so color tone and vibrancy do not appear unrealistic. Blues and reds are very good, but at times darker greens can appear lighter than in real life.

Finally, the low-light performance on this camera is unusually fantastic. While leaving all settings on auto, shots (like those below) which are in dark locations are made lighter than they actually are in real life with minimal grain. Where there is virtually no light, you have a LED flash/light that enables you to brighten your surroundings in a fairly even manner at around 1-2m distance (after that the flash is not very effective).

Sony says that the good low light performance is due to their Exmor R CMOS mobile sensor that they incorporated into the Xperia Ray, and the benefits certainly show. It’s no DSLR, but for a phone camera on a mid-range device you can expect some great, crisp, colourful shots out of the Ray that mean you don’t need to carry around a point-and-shoot.

Media Playback & Call Quality

When it comes down to playing music through the built-in loudspeaker on any device, you’ll probably want to turn away immediately and hope that you don’t have to listen to the garbled mess of tones with absolutely no bass and piercing high frequencies. This carries to the Xperia Ray, and while its speaker is quite loud and audible at maximum volume in your pocket in a loud room, there is no reason why you would want to use the speaker for anything other than your ringtone and for notifications.

Quality out of the audio jack is very good, to say the least. I always go by what I can get out of my Galaxy S, which I regard as delivering almost pristine audio quality, and I have to say that what I experienced out of the Ray was very, very close in quality to the Galaxy S. The only downside was that high-pitch tones seemed, at times, to be a tiny bit unnaturally louder than the rest of the frequencies.

For a media-centric device it sure is great to see the stellar display, exceptional camera, great music player and good sound output; but there was one area I was very disappointed with when it came to media playback: video playback. Check out the results of the testing below.

This is ultimately a bad result. AVI file playback I consider important when a lot of downloadable media uses this filetype, and I’ve seen it work (with some performance issues) on the HTC Sensation, so it’s disappointing to see the Ray not even recognize it. No WMV playback is also a surprise considering it worked on every other device I’ve used.

What makes it worse is that the only file type that played was the 720p MP4 file with 2-channel audio – so be prepared for conversion if your collection is primarily AVI or higher resolution MP4 files. The phone takes video in MP4 format so this is no doubt why it supports this file type, but for a phone with a media focus you would think Sony Ericsson would include support for more major filetypes than just one.

One upside of failing to support formats on the phone is that Sony have developed a Windows-only application called Media Go that will automatically convert some of the filetypes above for use on the Xperia Ray. It will convert the WMV and AVI files for you, but if you are looking to convert MKV and MT2S then you’ll have to get a third-party application.

There are a couple of other mentions that should be made about media playback of the device that are on the better side of things. First up is the FM Radio, which works great and is a good part of a media-centric phone. The other is the Connected Devices app, which turns your Ray into a media server that allows other devices on your WiFi network (like your PS3 or Bravia TV, but also others) to access the media files stored on your device, like the photos and videos that you have taken.

Finally a mention goes out to the call quality on the Xperia Ray, which, like pretty much every phone out there these days, is perfectly fine. Callers are audible on both ends and there are no complaints. The Ray also packs noise cancellation technology making it easier for the receiving end to hear your voice in noisy environments.

Quick Video Overview

Below is a quick video rundown of the features and best parts of the Xperia Ray, along with some video demonstrations.

Battery Life

The battery life of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is remarkably good, and I’m sure that this is mostly due to the 1,500 mAh battery that resides under the rear cover of the device. Both the HTC Sensation, which has to power a 4.3-inch display and dual-core CPU, and Galaxy S have ~1,500 mAh batteries so I was expecting the Ray, having to only power a 3.3-inch display, to last a lot longer.

This was definitely the case. With light-to-moderate usage I could easily get two days of battery life out of the device, and with virtually no usage the device could have easily lasted three days without shutting down. For a mid-range smartphone this is exactly what I would be looking for and is what you get with the Ray.

When I first was using the device, with heavy usage including lots of web browsing, gaming, media playback and camera use I killed the battery in just less than 13 hours, which is much better than what I could achieve with my Galaxy. If you are in the market for a small device with a long battery life for a smartphone, then the Xperia Ray might just be what you are looking for.

Conclusion

When it comes down to choosing a small, mid-range device that is still powerful enough to run the majority of Android applications, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is a fantastic option to choose. Despite having only a 3.3-inch display, which can be hard to type on but looks simply fantastic, the Ray is the perfect fit for your hand with sturdy construction and a great design.

With a media focus, naturally the media areas of the phone are going to be good. While video playback was unfortunately lacklustre, this was made up for by the stellar quality camera with superior low-light performance and great music player and audio quality. Sony Ericsson have done a good job in this respect.

When it comes down to the price, which is currently sitting at AU$420 (US$435, £275, €315) for the device unlocked and without a contract, this is completely reasonable for what you get in the package. Phones with similar specs such as the HTC Desire S and HTC Desire HD are sitting at the AU$500 mark, and with the Ray you get an AU$80 saving for a smaller footprint and better camera.

The closest device to the Ray in terms of pricing would be the Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo, which is essentially the Ray placed into a larger form factor with a 3.7-inch display and AU$400 price tag. It then boils down to a choice of size, and if smaller is what you’re after – the Ray is going to be your best option out there.

Our Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray was kindly provided by Mobicity, and will be returned to them following the conclusion of the review. The device's software and firmware were fully updated at the time of writing