Indian e-retailer Letsbuy.com has brought to India the qwerty-enabled Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro priced at Rs 15,399 ($340)
The phone, despite having decent specifications like a 1GHz processor, 5 Megapixel camera, WiFi and Android 2.3 Gingerbread, is not exactly the ‘latest and greatest’ in the league of smart-phones.
The biggest factor that differentiates the Xperia Mini Pro is its small size and the smallish 3-inch display.
While the 3 inch display makes it almost worthless to many who see their phones as gaming, multimedia and Internet devices, it makes it attractive for customers, especially women, who prefer small phones.
Most of the other phones in the range of Rs 15,000-20,000 come with displays that are around 3.5 to 4.3 inches in size.
Another pro for the phone is the Sony Ericsson brand. The London-based company, which built up a huge fan base in India thanks to its reputation for sturdy, dependable and stylish phones 3-4 years ago, is still seen as a ‘premium’ brand by many Indians.
The phone is fairly and squarely aimed at the heavy-messaging types, especially women, and is one of the most stylish and elegant high-end phones on offer in India.
Unlike the other phones in the high-end range, this one has a single-core processor (good for battery-life), but has a decent amount of RAM at 512 MB. The iPhone4 too has 512 MB RAM (system memory used to launch and run applications), while the very high-end phones like Samsung Galaxy S2 and HTC Sensation have 1 GB and 768 MB of RAM respectively.
As expected, it comes with a capacitive TFT touch-screen, which guarantees excellent response, but colours that might not be as vivid as those of a Samsung or Nokia AMOLED screen device, such as the Wave series.
It has a poor 320 MB internal storage capacity (but supports memory cards of up to 32 GB, according to Letsbuy) and has a separate graphics processing unit.
The phone is in the same league as HTC’s Facebook phone, ChaCha and the Nokia E6, both priced in the same price band with similar functions.
However, the Xperia Mini Pro beats the others in terms of specifications as well as style and compactness, making it one of the most attractive phones at the Rs 15,000 price bands, especially for those who don’t care about display-size.
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