It's not that often you publish praise for our hardware and
software providers so I thought I would relate my recent experience. I have
just upgraded my Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro to Android 4.0 (free) and I must say
it's really good. The upgrade went very smoothly via my home laptop, only
taking about ten minutes (I live out in the country so my broadband is a bit
slow). All contacts and vital data preserved no problem (yes I did back up just
in case!). I also changed my provider to TalkTalk (TT) and that went very
smoothly too, at the time they nominated and I was able to keep my old number.
TT gave me a better deal than the previous provider, £5/month cheaper and on a
rolling one month contract - no long term-very good.
Only two complaints-first, please let it be known that
mobile phones with proper manual QWERTY keyboards should have shift keys
duplicated on both sides of the keyboard - just like a real typewriter and
computer. The Xperia has two shift keys both on the left, which makes
double-thumb operation not that easy. Try capital A with two thumbs when the
shift key is next to the A key. Apart from that I can highly recommend the
Xperia Pro if you send a lot of texts like me. It's also just the right size
and weight and with Android 4 is very fast, great colour screen, excellent
camera stills and video, good battery life and very responsive to touch.
Second complaint - Android 4.0 seems to have done away with
the 'favourites' touch key in Contacts which I had found most useful, being the
quickest way to my most used phone numbers. Also it appears that when silent
mode is activated, it also switches off the vibrate function which is hard to
understand. I thought that vibration was provided to allow one to know that
there was 'something coming in' without ringtone disturbance to others around,
in meetings etc. Please bring this to the attention of the Android 4.0
programmers so we can have the option of 'vibrate when silent' restored again.
Finally a tip. When setting up for email there are two ways
that the handset must be set up. The provider must give the correct P0P3 server
incoming and outgoing links for the handset. This is normally automatic now
with a new phone and/or provider. I was having trouble getting my emails on the
Pro, and TT could do no more than confirm that I had entered the right TT email
settings manually. Even so the handset said "could not contact
server" every time I tried to activate. On contacting Sony Ericsson they
could not help either. I then realised that the handset's Wi-Fi settings had to
be "told" to look for the specific TT email server and this can be
set manually via the settings menu. On setting this correctly, my emails worked
fine.
The point is neither TT nor SE told me about this second
adjustment and both appeared to be unaware of the need for it. This ought to be
passed on to the providers so that both issues can be addressed by them when a
new subscriber/new handset user is being "talked through" the setting
up process.
We say: Sony has been
arguably the best of all the major handset manufacturers for delivering the ICS
update, and it's nice to hear your own experience of it has also been a
positive one!
