Sony Ericsson Xperia Active Review

That said, it’s not the kind of phone you’ll take when you’re in the mood to go scuba diving. It’s important to know what the phone can and can’t do with the Ingress Protection rating it has got. At IP67, the numerical six indicates that it’s totally protected against dust, whilst the numerical seven indicates that it’s protected against the effect of immersion between 15cm and 1m for up to half an hour. 

Comes with a load of accessories

The phone comes with additional gear as well in the form of an armband, which could have been designed better to incorporate the headphone jack in the casing; a rubberized lanyard strap that you can wear on your wrist ala the strap on a Wii-remote and ear hooks to keep your headphones firmly in place. There are a couple of interchangeable back panels as well.

The bundled arm band accessory

With the unique design and the reinforced build, the Active is a nimble and small, but a sporty and rugged Android smartphone that you won’t need to worry too much about. We performed a couple of underwater tests on the phone. Head over to the video below to see the phone being pushed to its limits. 

Features

Interface

The Active runs on a 1GHz Scorpion processor with an Adreno 205 graphics processing unit. With that processing power, we expected the onboard Timescape UI and the corner icon homescreen to work quick and smooth, and the phone didn’t disappoint. Flicking through the menus and overall navigation is as quick as any other top-tier handset. Multitasking is handled pretty well with 512 MB of RAM and internal storage amounts to 1GB, of which 320 MB is user available. 

The interface

The four corners of the screen can hold shortcuts to applications and the rest of the screen is dedicated to widgets, shortcuts and other applications. In case a widget is too big, the top or the bottom corner icons get hidden to incorporate it onto the screen. The Timescape UI now supports calls, Facebook, messages and Twitter in its timeline and it does prove particularly useful if you quickly want to browse through your Twitter feeds. 

The phone has a wet finger tracking feature and though there is a certain threshold after which it doesn’t recognize the wet touch, it works pretty well and will help those who use their phone whilst sweating it out in the gym or jogging in the rain. 

The benchmarks

We put the phone through a couple of synthetic tests as well. AnTuTu gave the Active a benchmark score of 2888, putting it in a similar range of the Nexus S. Linpack gave a single thread score of 33.706 MFLOPS and a multi thread score of 38.141 MFLOPS, which is telling.