Sony Xperia S is one of the most attractive terminals of the first half of 2012, especially since it’s the first phone under the Sony brand and not Sony Ericsson. Although Sony has not made the leap into the world of quad-core, it has an impressive design, screen and camera, and we tested the Xperia S to find out what makes it special.
Image Credit – Mobilissimo
The new smartphone from Xperia series measures 10.6 mm and weighs 144 grams, and the first impression is that the smartphone is harder than it looks. From the beginning we see that the bottom bar is transparent, and hides the symbols of the three Android capacitive buttons (Home, Back, and Menu), buttons which you actually press above the bar transparent, using some points as guidance. Here is the first problem, because users with large fingers will have problems touching the write buttons, which are not quite clear and don’t respond quickly to commands. Sony has reduced the area of capacitive buttons in order to include the cellular antenna at the bottom, in the transparent area, to avoid a possible death grip.
Regarding the screen, we have a 4.3-inch display that supports a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. This is a 342 ppi display, superior to all mobile devices to the number of pixels onscreen, even the iPhone 4/4S, which provides 326 ppi. The same screen uses the Sony Bravia Engine technology, in order to deliver a special light and bright color. The display is a LCD with LED backlight and comes with a screen protector applied directly on it. I noticed that the viewing angles and color depth can’t be compared, for example, with an AMOLED display, so Sony has to work on this issue.
Image Credit – Mobilissimo
Sony Xperia S comes with a removable battery, and hiding under the back cover is a MicroSim slot just because the smartphone does not have a microSD. The new Xperia offers 32 GB storage space, 1 GB RAM memory, a 1.5 GHz dual core processor, a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260 and an Adreno 220 GPU. As for connectivity, we have 14.4 Mbps HSDPA, WiFi, DLNA, NFC, Bluetooth 2.1 and microUSB 2.0. Calls are heard excellent and here we can knotice the active noise cancellation technology in the background. Not as good are the headphones that come with the terminal, which I consider mediocre, especially compared with those of Xperia Play for example.
Regarding the camera, we have a 12 megapixel sensor, autofocus; LED flash, geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection and the 3D view. The terminal is able to capture 30fps and supports video stabilization. Learn that the phone includes a 1.3 megapixel front camera with support for 720p capture at 30 fps. Finally, the hardware of this new model from Sony is completed by an accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity sensor, compass, AGPS and Glonass, plus a HDMI port.
Image Credit – Mobilissimo
Turning to the software, we are provided with the usual Android 2.3 Gingerbread costumed by Sony, plus the promise that we will receive Android 4.0 S ICS in the near future. As usual we have available Timescape and Mediascape functions, first with new widgets. Timescape provides access to social services like Twiter and Facebook and gives you both a widget that shows the things friends have done recently, plus a vertical scrollbar showing new statuses.
Regarding Sony Xperia S, conclusions are clear: those few small defects prevents it from being a superphone and I can even say that it doesn’t suffer from lags and has a very fluid interface plus a very attractive design.
