I was looking for a droid around Rs. 15000 andI I bought Sony xperia l. Why?? Read on to know.
The Pakage
Well, it has all the essential things in the box. Headphones, Charger, USB Cable, The phone itself, battery and few books (warranty, user guide etc).The charger still says Sony Ericson on the side. I got the Rose Red as it is possible to replace it to black later which wouldn’t be possible with the white one.
The Design
It’s a stylish phone with Sony’s Arc Design; it is thick at top and bottom while thin in the middle. A silver colored metallic strip runs along the sides and it has slant edges on front top and bottom. The complete unit looks rich and stylish. The silver strip at the bottom also acts as the notification LED, which is not customizable as it was in the previous Xperia phones.
The front side has a camera in the top left corner, a sensor, ear piece, and mic at the bottom. The back holds the main camera lens which is again stylishly designed with a sliver circular metal around it. The LED flash next to it and a noise cancellation mic.
I bought a yellow silicon back cover and installed launcher 8 to make it look like Lumia and it worked people were confused and few of them literally believed that its a windows phone 😛
The other phone in the above picture is my old HTC Explorer as I thought it deserves a mention on this review as it has served me well for almost 2 years.
Dimensions
• Size 65×128.7×9.7 mm, Weight 137 g
At 9.7” it’s not too slim but who cares it really looks sexy thanks to its curves 😛
Display
• TFT Size 4.3 Inches FWVGA, 480 x 854 Pixels (though antutu detected 480×782 only, maybe because of the on screen buttons), 16 M colors, Multitouch up to 4 Fingers, Scratch Resistant
The Screen clarity (228 ppi), Colors are good however there are other devices available with much higher resolution and Amoled displays in this budget.Antutu It’s not a gorilla glass however Sony says it’s Scratch Resistant. Though I got a screen guard to be on the safer side (Well, I had to be cautious, Because I know what all you may go through if you brake the screen, My cousin broke his S III’s and it cost him a bundle to get it replaced ).
Under the hood
Connectivity
• Single SIM, GSM (Normal One no need to get a smaller SIM)
• Operating Freq GSM – 850, 900, 1800, 1900; UMTS – 2100
• GPRS,EDGE,3G,WiFi and Portable Hotspot, USB with Tethering, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0,3.5mm Audio Jack
The Wifi Reception is not too good when compared with my 2 year old HTC Explorer. One other bug/Problem I found is Data Transfer acts funny sometimes when transferring using USB cable. It doesn’t allow me to paste data in the internal storage sometimes. Even the games folder is gone leaving no clue. There was no such problem while transferring data using the Bluetooth except for the extremely slow transfer rate.There’s a cool widget to manage all connectivity options.
Antutu detected only 4 sensors, shown in the above picture.
Hardware
• CPU: 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Play, Dual Core ARM v7
• GPU: Adreno 305
Now, this is one of the main reasons why i bought L. It has one of the most powerful chipset in this price bracket right now. I ran Antutu and it managed a very respectable score of 12211.The user interface is fast and you won’t see any lags at all.
Gaming
I installed NFS Most Wanted, Real Racing 3, Iron Man 3 and Dead Trigger. All these Games ran just fine without any lags or glitches.However the temperature was too high (53C) after playing Real Racing for half an hour.
Software
It came with android jelly bean 4.1.2 which is old, 4.2 is available from Sony however I would upgrade it to 4.3 directly (heard from a friend that 4.3 would be out by December).
It has lots of pre installed apps and I found file commander, Neo Reader, Officesuite and half a dozen others useful while Goolgle Play Movies, Books,Xperia Link,Sony Select and a bunch of others are of no use for me.
It has walkman, it would be great if it also had bravia and I wonder why don’t the camera says cybershot anywhere 😛
The UI is pleasant with the user friendly drag n drop features. There’s also a gamut of widgets and apps to spice up the user interface. The ones i like the most are album widget and walkman.
Memory
• Internal 8 GB of which only 5.67 GB is available (1.57GB as Device Memory and 4.1GB as Internal Memory )
• Expandable Up to 32GB with memory card.
• RAM 1 GB RAM (785MB Available).
The RAM is sufficient, however Sony could have provided more internal Memory (Even Samsung Advance had 16GB variant for 13k).
Battery
• 1750 mAh
Battery is not great it hardly lasts a day with normal usage and maybe 6-8 hours if you play
Games or movies.
The Camera
• 8 Megapixel Primary Camera with Smile Detection, HDR (for both image and Video), Autofocus, 720p Video Recording and LED Flash.
• 0.3 Megapixel Secondary Camera
Sony’s official website says Camera Expertise on phone. However I found mixed results from the phones camera. The images were overall okay but full of noise.
below are some snaps I took. for more pictures click here
The HDR vs Normal mode. Its clearly visible that HDR works good but the noise spoils the overall clarity.
I will upload some video samples later.
The Conclusion
I bought it for Rs. 15200 here in pune(India).
Xperia M, Galaxy Core, Galaxy Quattro, LG L9, Galaxy Grand are worthy competitors.
Xperia M has a smaller screen only 4” and a lower resolution camera 5mp but the same chipset and dual sim option.
Galaxy core doesn’t support 720p recording and Quattro has an A5 CPU and a lower resolution display.
LG L9 is costlier yet the CPU and Camera is not as good as L’s.
I personally feel that Grand has a better camera than Sony xperia l and it supports dual SIM but it costs more and has a Broadcom processor.
Another good phone is Xperia C but it costs way more than what everyone was expecting.
Considering all these factors I’m pretty much satisfied and would suggest it to anyone on a budget of 15k rupees looking for an android phone.