Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro - Love at First Sight

It's all about the keyboard.

    I have been a long time user of the Nokia N900. The openness the phone provided was almost a dream come true. In it's glory day the phone was a masterpiece. Certainly a reason to believe of Nokia as a champion amongst men. At least to us nerds anyways. Sadly the openness of the phone was also it's weakness in that the software eco structure, while robust, was also not nearly as exhaustive as iOS and Android counterparts. That said after nearly 2 years with the N900, I decided it was time to get a new phone. I knew I wasn't going to be getting an iOS based phone for two reasons:
1.) No real file system
2.) No physical keyboard
    I treat my phone like a computer. It is for all intents and purpose a computer. (Running an inferior OS sure, but a computer none the less) I wanted to support WP7 but it's OS was still too much in it's infancy for me to bite at that apple. So Android it was.

The screen really is beautiful. It uses Sony's proprietary Bravia engine to achieve this

     The current trends in the smart phone arena seems to be who can make the largest but thinnest phone. Granted these phones have serious guts, but their size is just too much of a turn off. When your phone is approaching the size of genuine x86 based tablets, it seizes to be a phone, and there fore a waste of money.
    I saw the Mini Pro at an Expert here in Germany and was instantly intrigued. Small, well built, and had a physical keyboard. The specs while inferior to other flag ships, did not limit its abilities in anyway. It works on 512 megs of operating ram, and around 400 meg of built in storage. Additional storage is provided in the way of micro SD. I'm using a 32gb stick in mine. It runs on a 1ghz snapdragon processor. The thing is speedy, and I have never experienced any slow down in using it. The keyboard is great with the only exception being the space bar. It takes some getting use, to ensure a key press, due to it's position relative to fingers. The screen is glorious, and the build quality is typical of SE's standard. In short the phone is everything I wanted. The only problem I have, is I would have appreciated at least a gig of operating memory. Outside of this the phone works great, and completely replaces the n900 in a smaller more powerful format.

VNC Viewer connected to Mac Mini (via Real VNC server), running Windows 7 via Parallels Desktop 7

   I use the phone to ssh home to vnc servers, and vnc viewer to control those computers. This allows me to work code, or start downloads, etc. anywhere regardless of whether I have a computer on me. I love the phone, and truly hope that this series is continued and improved on.