Sony Xperia Miro: Initial Impressions

Sony currently have quite a few devices for sale, especially at the bottom end of the pile. The Miro being one of them, it is like the Tipo’s bigger brother, costing a little more and packing a slightly better spec.

My initial good and bad points are as follows:

Good points

Ice Cream Sandwich
Soft touch back panel
Solid build
Quick movement through the UI
Plenty of internal memory for the target market
MicroSD slot

Bad points

Plasticy feel to the phone
Basic spec
Odd chin design
HVGA screen
Odd placement for power button (only odd for left handed people like me)

Design

The Miro is in a similar price bracket as the Xperia Tipo we reviewed the other week, yet the design of the Miro is nicer, mainly down to it being thinner. Button and port wise the Miro has the expected selection of power, volume, capacitive buttons and a sloping chin thing. Nothing astounding here.

Here are some photos of the Miro:

Hardware

The Miro has a pretty basic spec, yet similarly like the Xperia Tipo, even with a low spec it runs pretty well.

Here are the specs for the Miro:

Dimensions – 113 x 59.4 x 9.9 mm
Weight – 110 g
Touch – sensitive controls
Display – LED-backlit LCD 16M colours
Display size – HVGA 320 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches (165 ppi pixel density)
Protection – Scratch-resistant glass
MicroSD, up to 32 GB
Internal memory – 4 GB storage (2.2 GB user available), 512 MB RAM
Camera 5MP, autofocus, LED flash
Camera features – Geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, 3D sweep panorama
Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
Chipset – Qualcomm MSM7225A
CPU – 800 MHz Cortex-A5
GPU – Adreno 200
Battery – Li-Ion 1500 mAh

Highlights of the spec are the internal memory is quite larger for a budget phone and along with the MicroSD slot you can carry a lot of music, video, documents or pictures. On paper the camera sounds good, I’ll test that out soon. The HVGA screen also on paper sounds bad and I’ll be trying that out as well. The camera has a flash which should help with low light photos.

Software

The Miro runs Ice Cream Sandwich which is a massive plus point, mainly so you can access the latest versions of apps. Such as Chrome or Tweet Lanes. The Miro comes with the Xperia launcher, which in its current state is perfectly usable and has a few useful widgets, mainly with a social media or multi media slant. Most of the standard Android apps have a slight Sony skin on them, which I do not mind. It’s not like they have messed with core functionality here, like some other OEM’s do.

Initial Conclusion

Overall I like the Miro as Sony have fixed a lot of the problems I had with the Tipo (mainly due to screen size). It seems like a great phone for someone who hasn’t used Android before or just wants a cheap capable phone. Over the next few weeks I will be using the Miro and if you’d like to see anything trialled out then leave us a comment below and I’ll do my best to deal with your request.

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