Sony Xperia P is the second device under Sony’s new NXT series, Xperia S being the first one and Xperia U is the third. Sony has been rebranding its image with its new ‘Sony’ name after the business acquisition and NXT series marks its start. Let’s start with the review of this mid-range Android device – Xperia P.
Hardware
Display
The phone has a 4 inch qHD (540×960) display, White display, which is powered by Sony’s Bravia Multimedia engine. The display is very nice. What Sony calls as the WhiteMagic display, the viewing angles are really good. The viewing pleasure is not lost due to those viewing angles, thanks to Sony’s newly adopted display technology. The display is RGBW (not RGB Pentile), which does suffer a bit when using the phone under sunlight. The screen distorts colours and image doesn’t appear that clear. The screen has 275 ppi and is surprisingly good for this price point. Coming to the design and feel of this device, the phone has a unibody design, with a matte aluminium back, consisting of the Camera, flash and the old Sony Ericsson logo.
Build
“The curved shape makes the phone fit better in your palm.”
The sides of the phone are quite not ideal for holding the phone. You get the feeling of slipping the phone out of your hand here and there. Thankfully, the curved shape makes the phone fit better in your palm. On the left side, there is USB + charging port on the top, followed by HDMi port and then a covered micro SIM slot at the center. On the other side, we have the loudspeaker, the lock and sleep/ power button, volume rocker and camera key. These keys are well made and are fairly responsive to use.
On the front, below the screen, there is a transparent bar which holds the capacitive touch buttons – Back button, Home button and Options button. The heptic feedback from these buttons helps in better navigation through the menu and functionalities of the phone. On the top, there is just the standard 3.5 mm headset jack and at the bottom, we’ve the usual mic-in. The device is light (120 g) and fits in conveniently in your pocket. There is nothing cheap about the hardware. It feels premium to hold.
Camera
“Suffers a bit under low light conditions.”
The phone has an 8 MP camera (F/2.4) which performs pretty well and can shoot full 1080p videos. The images taken are usually crisp, though, it suffers a bit when used in low light conditions. You can click a picture using the physical button or the onscreen icon. The physical button could be used to switch on the camera. On a soft press, you focus in the image, and on pressing it further, your photo gets clicked.
Here are some image samples:
Here is a video shot with the Xperia P:
Sound
“The headset gives a clear sound.”
The phone’s loudspeaker sits on the left; the sound is clear and quite loid for calling purpose. The bundled audio headset gives clear sound but not that good on bass and treble. I would suggest you to get a decent pair and this phone shall take care further of your music quality needs. I was expecting a little better audio quality given it’s a Sony product.
Just above the screen sits the phone speaker and the LED notification light. The light blinks when there is some notification like an SMS, Email, missed call and it stays on while charging the phone. It I a nice add-on and the light spot doesn’t spoil the looks of the device.
Battery
The phone’s 1,305 mAh battery doesn’t do that well. You can barely work 24 hours with it, provided there are no heavy web, WiFi and calls made. Sony should have fitted a larger battery for this NXT series device. For normal use, I was able to get 10-12 hours or backup, mostly.
The call quality and signal reception remained stable through the period. There wasn’t any case of call drops where the network reception was quite strong.
Software
The LT22i runs on Android 2.3.7 with Sony’s UXP NXT UI on top of it. Even after having Android 4.0 out since last November, we have so many phones running on Gingerbread. This certainly marks as a con. At this price point, at this point of time, you expect to get ICS out of the box.
There are five homescreens – all can be customized as per user’s own choice. The shot below shows you an option to choose the widgets that can be placed on the Homescreen!
You can put or create a folder, new widget (as available), a new app shortcut or change wallpapers right from the screen. One has to just long tap on one of the homescreens to dig into these otions and then choose accordingly. There are 4 icons at the bottom of the screen, by default – there is a folder, Play Store, Messaging and Phone(call, with Menu icon at the center.
The lockscreen works with the usual swipe to right mechanism, it shows basic information while the music player is on.
I would say Son’y hasn’t really done much to differentiate the OS’s look, and in some ways, that’s good. It is not as functional as HTC’s Sense, but it certainly does not give on-the-face experience.
Benchmarks
The Xperia was able to clock between the HTC Desire HD and LG Optimus 2X. But this is not a full fledged device that can scream out some new games available in the Google Play Store. The Xperia P clocked a Quadrant score of 2185. But there were only rare cases when we spotted a lag in the performance.
Quadrant
We also pushed it hard to get the taste of HTML5 browser performance, and we put the device to test to check how fast the canvas elements are rendered on the device. The device did have some lag here and there during the test, and we set out to put the device to test with the app. And the score was pretty disappointing with just 212 out of 500.
But when you browse websites like GMail web app or any other regular web app, there’d be no lags across the device. Which we think is really good. And if you are a normal user, who rely on the web browser for Gmail and other web apps, this should work out pretty well for you!
Processor & Others
The phone is powered by a dual core 1 GHz A9 processor that does most of the tasks pretty well, there is some lag with quite a few apps opened, live wallpaper and multimedia heavy web page opened. The phone supports Flash 11 and it does make some difference while opening webpages with heavy Flash in usage.
The phone should have been running on Android 4.0 but instead, it will get this update somewhere in Q3 of this year, when we will be having Jelly Bean devices. Of course, this problem is not particular to Sony phones but in general, Google needs to do something about this upgrade cycle mess, by interacting with the OEMs, perhaps.
There are some nifty little touches here and there – you can set any particular app or Menu to open as soon as you plug-in your earphones – which is kind of handy. I would really like Sony to work on functionality of their UI, the look and feel of it is, no doubt, appealing and seems organized, it is just that the user has to make several more taps than what would he/she may have to while performing the same task on another OEM’s device. Also, lesser bloatware would be appreciated. Not many really need it.
NFC Capabilities and Wireless
There is NFC support but we couldn’t test it as Sony didn’t send us the NFC SmartTags. You can connect the device via DLNA with other devices supporting the same, for streaming videos, images and is now a normal smartphone feature considering how many people like to view their family content on their large TV screens.
[royalslider id=”13″]Our take on Xperia P
All in all, aesthetically, Sony has done a pretty good job. Software does put this phone behind and makes phones like SGS2 and Galaxy Nexus ahead, but if you can wait for the promised update and want a phone which taked good photos, looks appealing, then this could well be the right choice.
Sony Xperia P sends all the Sony lovers a clear message that the company is set out to get some beautiful and good looking and power packed device in the coming months. The Xperia P is a very good device when compared to its competitors, but until the company pushes out the Android 4.0 update to it, its going to be taking a back seat at our score board.