At the end of this year’s spring, in May, Sony delivered the Xperia U, a phone with a distinguished design and a pretty wealthy set of skills, marking the Sony’s excellent performance in the compact class smartphone market. Let’s take a closer look at the most important specs:
Key features
• Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
• 3.5" 16M-color capacitive touchscreen of Full WVGA resolution (854 x 480 pixels) with Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine
• Android OS v2.3.7 Gingerbread, planned Android 4.0 ICS update
• Dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9 CPU, 512 MB RAM, NovaThor U8500 chipset
• 5 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging, Multi Angle shot
• 720p video recording @ 30fps with continuous autofocus and stereo sound
• Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
• GPS with A-GPS
• 8 GB built-in storage (6 GB user-accessible)
• microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• Voice dialing
• Adobe Flash 11 support
• Deep Facebook integration
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Transparent stripe changes color depending on screen content
• Replaceable cap at the bottom allows easy customization
For the full specs, please visit here.
http://www.mobilephonedeals.com
Let’s take a look in its box. We can see here the microUSB cable, a fast charger (your phone will be ressurected in less than an hour using this baby along with the USB cable), a microSIM adapter, the headphones, a polishing cloth and a plastic cap for the bottom of your phone. The bottom caps are available in colors like black, white, pink and yellow, depending on how much of a wacko are you. I’m just kidding, of course.
The phone measures 112 x 54 x 12 mm, weighs 110 grams and, like I’ve said before, it will surely capture your attention through its peculiar edgy appearance. Having a strong build, but still light and compact, it will sit comfortable in your hands and pockets.
Its frontal part is almost fully taken by the 3.5 inches FWVGA Bravia LCD screen, a piece of work which offers great sunlight legibility and has good viewing angles. Under the display are three capacitive controls for Back, Home and Menu and a transparent plastic strip that lights in different colors, matching the current theme or the color that sticks out the most when viewing an image from the gallery. Pretty neat, huh ? Above the screen is the front-facing VGA camera with its buddies, the earpiece and proximity sensor.
The left side hosts the microUSB port and SIM card slot, meanwhile the right side is home for the volume rocker, Power/Lock key and the shutter button.
The top has the 3.5mm audio jack and secondary microphone (for noise-cancellation). The primary microphone sits at the bottom.
The phone comes running with Android v2.3 (Gingerbread) and is upgradeable to 4.0. Inside it lives a STE U8500 chipset, the 1 GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core processor, 512 MB of RAM memory and a Mali-400MP GPU. You can practically do anything you want and the phone will be highly responsive and work smoothly, without bugging you out with lag issues or things like that.
The call quality is great as the voices are loud and clear even in noisy environments, thanks to the secondary microphone that I’ve mentioned earlier in the review. The reception is also good and the Xperia U is kind enough to give us Smart and Voice dialing.
Messaging is also fine, your SMS and MMS are organized into threads and each thread looks like a conversation. You can forward, copy, delete your messages, search through them for a specific one and you also have an option for locking them against deletion. The on-screen portrait QWERTY keyboard may cause some issues if you have big fingers, but the landscape mode will surely solve them.
The phone’s connectivity is well packed, having support for GSM, GPRS, EDGE quad-band 2G and 3G, 14.4 Mbps HSDPA, 5.76 Mbps HSUPA, Wi-Fi b/g/n with DLNA, Wi-Fi Hotspot and Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP and EDR.
The browser is pretty simple and supports double tapping and pinching to zoom, text reflow, panning, bookmarks, multiple tabs, find on page and many others. The pages are rendered smoothly and the big star here is the full Flash 11 support.
The Xperia U comes with a 5 megapixel camera which has autofocus, a LED flash and takes pictures at a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. Some extra features are scenes, resolution, geotagging, face and smile detection, image stabilization, focus mode and 3D sweep panorama. The photos produced are above average, with accurate colors and good contrast.
Its video camera shoots 720p clips at 30 fps and also does a good job, I have nothing to complain about.
The music player supports MP3, WMA, WAV, eAAC+ and proudly owns a Cover Flow-like interface and also has some cool features, like the Infinite button – who looks up videos on YouTube, lyrics and other information like that about your currently played song, SensMe – a functionality that filters your music by mood (dance, relaxed, emotional etc). Some equalizer presets are here too. The audio quality is pretty clear, I was impressed. FM Radio is here too and it brought its friends, RDS and TrackID.
The video player supports MP4, WMV, DivX and XviD and the image quality is good.
In terms of applications, you have Office Suite for viewing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. You’ll have to upgrade to the paid application for editing. Cloud storage integration is assured by DropBox, Box and Google. Some other apps are the World clock, Calendar, YouTube, Gmail and many others. Another useful application available for free from the Play Store is the Media Remote, used as a remote control for Sony Blu-ray or DVD players and DLNA Bravia TVs.
The Xperia U includes a GPS receiver with A-GPS support and Google Maps for navigation and Wisepilot as an alternative (for only 30 days for free). You can plan routes, go into Street View, search for close points of interest and stuff like that.
The phone’s 1320 mAh will survive for more than one day of intensive usage, meaning you have about one hour for each task, like making calls, browsing, taking pictures, music playback and texting.
In conclusion, this is a pretty good and docile smartphone that will answer to your needs, impress your friends with its neat design and perform these things for a small amount of money.
For a good deal on a Sony Xperia U, please visit our website.
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