MWC 2011 Live: Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc Hands-on Preview

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The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc was officially unveiled in Las Vegas at CES 2011, but Sony Ericsson brought this powerful Android beast to the Mobile World Congress too. We checked out the newly launched Xperia Play and Xperia Pro, and then headed out for some hands-on time with the Xperia Arc.

The phone is truly amazing, but can it really fight the competition’s Android handset and the current and future iPhones? Of all four Android handsets I checked out today, the Arc is the most impressive. It’s the kind of smartphone I’d be looking to buy from Sony Ericsson at a certain point in the future, but maybe not right now. I don’t want a slide-out mechanism, whether it’s a gaming controller or a full QWERTY keyboard, and I don’t want the Neo either. That only leaves the Arc. The handset seems great, but it still needs some attention from Sony Ericsson before it becomes available later in Q1.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc could be considered, from certain points of view, the flagship Android handset of the company for this first half of the year. Although that’s certainly debatable, depending what you want your smartphone to do.

It’s very light, it has an impressive display, it’s pretty responsive, although Sony Ericsson could always improve that and looks elegant too even with that plastic feeling you get when handling it. At first glance the Xperia Arc is a worthy Android smartphone, and hopefully Sony Ericsson will not let us down when it comes to taking care of this little baby. After all the Xperia X10 was a great handset too. A Donut-running one! On comparison the Xperia Arc will ship with Gingerbread installed right out of the box, but will it get IceCream thereafter?

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