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The Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro runs Android 2.3 with exactly the same slick, simple and stylish Sony Ericsson user interface overlay that we saw in the Xperia Mini.
This means you see the same corner-based user interface that also worked to such good effect in last year's X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro, with the addition of a landscape view when the phone's keyboard is slid out.
As well as your five standard Android home screens, each page comes with a customisable icon in the corner. You can stick anything you want in here, simply by long-pressing on the corner or dragging a shortcut in from the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro's main applications screen.
Of course, when the smartphone's keyboard is pulled out, the home screen and everything else automatically flips to landscape mode, making the 3-inch screen feel roomier.
New and exciting for 2011 is the addition of multiple icons in the corners, so you can have up to four items in each slot. This is a really nice system. We were oddly compelled to organise everything nicely, creating one corner for camera, gallery and imaging apps, another for calling functions, plus one containing web apps and social applications.
Also, it's now possible to add icons and shortcuts to the home screen itself – standard Android style – something last year's X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro didn't include due to their absolutely tiny screens.
If you need a better look at everything on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro, a two-fingered pinch of the screen explodes your widgets out into a very nice floating overview mode. Pressing again on one of the
If the Sony Ericsson blue is starting to bore you, there's a selection of themes to apply. As well as changing the home screen wallpaper, these also alter the backgrounds of the many Android menu screens, jazzing up what was a rather bland system when it first arrived on the company's original X10.
Sony Ericsson is still sticking with its Timescape widget as its main social network tool, but it's interesting that the big, flickable widget hasn't been pre-installed to take up any of the home screen widget slots. It's
Sony Ericsson has also jumped into the crowded weather widget scene with a simple weather station of its own, which streams in AccuWeather data and provides a simple three-day forecast when tapped.
As for organising everything, the main app menu on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro can be sorted alphabetically, by popularity or date installed, or users can touch the little grid icon to the bottom-right of the list to detach all the icons so they can be dragged around and organised to your own preference.
