Google Nexus S vs Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc

Paul Briden

We pit the new Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc against Google and Samsung's collaborative effort, the Samsung Google Nexus S

We take a look at how the Samsung made Google Nexus S stacks up against Sony Ericsson’s snazzy new Xperia Arc.
Form:
Google Nexus S - 123.9 x 63 x 10.9 mm, 129 g
Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc - 125 x 63 x 8.7 mm, 117 g
Stylistically the Google Nexus S is fairly dull, it may be nicely compact and fits snugly in the palm of your hand but it doesn’t stand out as anything special amidst many other similar looking phones from the last few years.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, on the other hand, pushes the visual boundaries of what you expect from a phone.
Sony Ericsson has developed a boldness in aesthetics since their launch of the ‘PlayStation’ gaming phones and it now appear to have a penchant for futuristic handsets with plenty of black and chrome.
The Xperia Arc wouldn’t look out of place in the hands of a spaceship crew in some Hollywood blockbuster movie with its overall angular design and interesting curvature down the length of the device.
We think the Xperia Arc looks much more dynamic.
Winner – Sony Ericsson Xperia ArcDisplay:
The Nexus S has a 4-inch Super Amoled capacitive touchscreen at 480 x 800 pixels and features a contoured, curved glass display with an oleophobic surface, meaning greasy fingerprints don’t cling to it quite so determinedly. Aside from this it has the usual run of multi-touch, accelerometer and gyro sensors.
Sony Ericsson has used a 4.2-inch LED-backlit LCD capacitive touchscreen in the Arc, rating at 480 x 854 pixels and with a scratch-resistant surface.
The Arc display runs the Timescape user interface and the Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine while other features include multi-touch and accelerometer.
Not much to differentiate these two but the slightly larger size and higher resolution of the Arc makes it a winner in this round.
Winner – Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc
Storage:
The Xperia Arc comes with 320 MB of onboard storage and 512 MB of RAM while supporting Micro SD cards up to 32 GB, an 8 GB card is supplied as standard.
The Nexus S has a rather more impressive 16GB storage and the same 512 MB of RAM as the Arc, but sadly no card support. Oh dear.
We’re always in favour of bigger onboard storage but we’re also in favour of card support so this is a tricky situation. With the RAM being equal it’s left to personal preference with onboard or external memory and in our case onboard just pips it.
Winner – Samsung Google Nexus S
Processor:
On the processor front the Xperia Arc is equipped with a single core 1GHz Scorpion processor on the Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset, coupled with an Adreno 205 graphics processing unit (GPU).
The Nexus is surprisingly well catered for with a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor on the Hummingbird chipset and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU.
There’s nothing wrong with the Cortex-A8 setup and it certainly bumps the Nexus to the top of the mid-range handset category but compared to the Qualcomm Scorpion of the Arc it’s a little bit behind.
Winner – Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc
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