Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray review

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray caters very well for your app needs. And of course, being an Android handset, what you get in the box is just the beginning, with much more available via the Android Market.

You'll find all the usual suspects in there, including Maps, Latitude, Places, Talk, Gmail and the excellent (and free!) Navigation Beta. Maps now supports 3D scrolling, although it only works in certain cities. It's nice to show the area around the Empire State Building to your friends, even if it is slightly pointless.

Sony Ericsson also provides you with helpful set-up and support apps.

The Calendar is standard Android fare – although we got a little annoyed with the fact that although it supports multiple Google calendars, by default it displays them all as the same colour, and we couldn't figure out how to change this.

It makes multiple calendars pretty pointless and means you have to concentrate more rather than just being able to evaluate your diary with a quick glance.

There are other helpful additions in there too, such as a Data Monitor, which will be a lifesaver if you're using your Android phone abroad in particular. We really wish we'd had it on a recent trip to Asia, where automatic updating of apps left our holiday anything other than cheap.

We thought we spotted Sony Ericsson's own app stores here, following Samsung's lead.

But its helpful Get Apps and Get Games offerings actually just show you a selection of recommendations that then require downloading via the Android market.

There is an alternative app store of sorts, in the form of PlayNow, which is a hangover from yesteryear. We fired it up and chuckled at the cheapness of it (the way it looks rather than the cost of apps) before closing it.

Heaven knows why Sony Ericsson still supports this, let alone ships it on handsets like the Xperia Ray, but it probably keeps somebody in a job.

For the business minded, you get Office Suite as standard, but closer inspection reveals that you need to upgrade to the Pro version if you want to edit documents, since the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray only comes with a licence for viewing office docs. Not that it's extortionate at $9.99, but it's a shame Sony Ericsson couldn't have felt the love and included this for free and swallowed the cost.

Having said that, a viewer is probably all you'll need, since any attempt to tap out more than the shortest of memos on that tiny but beautiful screen will no doubt lead to colourful language being emitted.