Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini review

You'd expect a relatively cheap smartphone with a tiny screen to be limited in terms of internet use, but the surprisingly powerful Xperia Mini does a great job of rendering and managing web pages.

The packed TechRadar home page loads fairly quickly, plus with full pinch-zoom support is easy to navigate.

Text reflowing is another useful feature within the Android browser, with a double-tap of any text field automatically zooming in on a lump of words and jiggling them about so they fill the available space. It happens quickly. It's something you'll definitely do, although you can't manually set the pinch-and-zoom distance and see the words re-jig... you'll need to use the plus and minus keys on screen to do this.

Thanks to the Xperia Mini squeezing a 1GHz processor into its tiny chassis, you also get full Flash Player support in the phone. Obviously this has some drawbacks, with web pages that are particularly full of Flash content and animating banners starting to slow down a little and grind away...

...but as is usual in Android, there's an option within the browser menus to have this content only load on demand, when you tap the area it should load up in, or to not have it load at all.

The bookmarking system is untouched by Sony Ericsson, which leaves us with the simple Android set-up. There's an icon beside the URL bar which opens up your bookmarks area, which is broken down into sections for your actual Bookmarks, the History and your Most Visited sites.

There's none of the advanced management or tagging options we've seen of late by phone makers such as HTC, but long-pressing on a bookmark entry brings up a menu that lets you share the URL, open it in a new tab, copy it to the clipboard or, very usefully, send it to the Home screen as a quick launch icon.

The tabbing system is another bit of a letdown compared to recent innovations we've seen in the HTC Desire S and LG Optimus 3D. You have to press the Menu key, then press again to bring up a text list of open windows.

It's not a huge inconvenience, but given the attention Sony Ericsson has lavished on other areas of its Android skin, it's a shame that the browser has been left rather bland in comparison.