[Xperia Arc General] kitsVA:
I am coming from almost 1 year use of X10a and even tried Galaxy SII after a week with Arc and sold SII mainly because I hated AMOLED colors and Samsung design and UI.

When I first got Misty Silver Arc (flashed LT15a) into my hands I was excited as the phone looked simply stunning. Felt great in hand.

Now, after two weeks of use I have very mixed feeling and I am already trying to look for what is out there that looks good and performs like GSII. Atrix? Not sure!!

Pros:

1. Screen

2. Looks (design) & Feel.

3. Gingerbread

4. SE UI

5. Camera

Cons:

1. Phone starts to lag once you install some widgets, and install basic apps. I am almost seeing very minimal gain from my X10 in performance once I install my standard apps/widgets.

2. Camera button is a joke. It's almost impossible to use without shaking the phone too much.

3. Too long. They could have tried and eliminated all that black area that has Sony Ericsson Logo.

4. The battery cover starts to feel squeaky in the middle area towards the side that has volume rockers. I had to put small tape inside to stop that feeling.

I might have to root and remove some pre-installed crap and see how the phone performs. Else, I am seriously thinking to sell the phone and maybe wait for something or go back to SGII and live with it's ugliness and fake colors on AMOLED. I just will have to wait for a good ROM for it as I couldn't stand the Samsung interface. It makes Android feel like their feature phone. I am also going to try and play with Atrix and compared it to arc. If the performance on Atrix is good, I might just get it as the phone feels solid and it at least looks better than GSII.

It amazes me how SE sc*$#s up with every phone in someway and I still end up owning them. With X10 it's the OS version and with Arc, lousy hardware specs. They should at least have provided more memory. I have a feeling they never tested Arc by installing any apps and widgets.

Apps/widgets I have installed - Go Contacts, Go Contacts Themes, Go SMS Pro, Go SMS Themes, Beautiful Widgets, Beautiful Widgets Animation, beautiful widgets themes, Widgetsoid, life.contacts, Amazon MP3, Amazon Appstore, Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, Fruit Ninja, Swype, Astro, ESPNCricInfo, Business Calendar, Just Pictures, Yahoo Mail, Tripit, Opera Mini, Twitter, xda premium, and Yelp.

What I mean by Laggy?

I don't mean it's so slow to get annoying. It only felt laggy compared to what I experienced with GSII. It's not annoying but at times I find it annoying when the dialer takes almost couple of seconds to load or my SMS shows blank blue screen for almost 4-6 seconds. At that time, if I restart my phone it performs better. I stopped using Live wallpapers hoping it will help phone perform better. I remember the performance was not like this when i played with the stock ROM. I am not sure if playing with whatsapp screw'd up something. I will try to reflash and see how it behaves.

Update1: I re-flashed my Arc and it now works blazing fast. In the next few weeks I will try to find if any particular app I used caused the issue or it's just a limitation with Arc if you have several apps/widgets installed with over 300 contacts and lost of them with high quality photo image linked through SE UI instead of picking low quality one from GMail.

Update2: I installed most of my commonly used apps and I see no lag now. I suspect having three weather apps might have some cause for the lag before as they were alway setup to get weather updated. I used Beautiful Weather, Go Weather, and WeatherBug Elite. I had Beautiful weather setup to have animation on unlock too. Or it just could be one of the other apps which I am used to download everyday from amazon appstore.