Sony's Xperia Ray

I've had the original iphone for about 5 years now, and after all this time, through many, many drops, trials and tribulations, still hums on without a hitch. Well mostly.

After 5 years of service, this baby's battery life has dropped significantly from almost a week between charges to less than 2 days :( I thought this was a good excuse to change to one of those nifty android devices.

My needs are quite simple, it needs to be able to
a) Make/receive phone calls
b) Send/receive sms texts
c) Alarms
d) Calendar
e) map application of sorts; I only use this (occasionally) overseas on tours.

One thing I looked forward to a new phone is proper 3G access; I've never actually used 3G before. Talk about out of date. It was a tough choice between two phones, the Nokia Lumia 800 (tried it, loved it) and one of the smaller sized android phones, and picked the sony for a few reasons: it used a regular sized sim card, and is much smaller and lighter than the iphone. In my pocket, I kept wondering if I left my phone at home as it was so tiny! I also got it off the amazon warehouse for a much better deal than retail (~£130), so it was a no brainer.

From what I've been playing around today, a few things stand out.
First, the iphone's screen, old as it is, still seems more vibrant. In addition, I felt the menus and menu transitions were far more polished. And we're talking about the very first iphone here, that's never had it's OS updated! My iphone has *never* ever been connected to iTunes.

I think what works for IOS is simplicity. Some call it a dumb OS, but the fact remains that I actually had to read the instructions as well as do some googling to figure out how to use some of the functions on the xperia ray. Iphone? Everything is onscreen, with only one home button. Took me a while to register the need to use the "settings" button on the bottom right of the ray to pull up menus and stuff.

That said, I think the Android OS is really neat for creating your own custom screens! I really enjoy setting up some of the very cool widgets - love the gallery widget - though I have concerns about battery life.

As mentioned above, with my usage pattern, I used to charge my iphone roughly once a week. Nearly all my friends tell me the longest they go without charging their android handset is 2 days, and it is more common to recharge the handset *every* day.

That's somewhat... inconceivable for me, with all this advancement in tech (quad core cpus in a handphone?! I don't need that for a calendar!), surely the battery life should have improved, and if not, at least matched what older phones are capable off.

So far, the phone (full charged in the afternoon) is down to about 55% of its battery life (insert big, very sad smiley face).

To be fair, I've been spending ALOT of time on it, poking around the various programs and setting up that delightful home screen as mentioned.

I hope once things settle down, the battery life can at least last 4-5 days. If not, there is a "power save" mode that shuts off all non-essential transmissions, so hopefully that will help.