The Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo was launched almost two years ago, in February 2011, but still remains a cool smartphone to have, as it looks great and holds a lot of features inside. Follow the next review and see what it has to offer – and I promise you: it’s quite a lot, given the fact that this fellow is almost two years old.
Key features
• Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
• 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
• 3.7" 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit LCD touchscreen of FWVGA resolution (480 x 854 pixels) on Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine
• Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread
• 1 GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 chipset
• 512 MB RAM
• 8 MP autofocus camera, LED flash, geotagging
• 720p video @ 30fps, continuous autofocus
• Front facing VGA camera, video calls
• Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
• GPS with A-GPS
• microSD slot (32GB supported, 8GB card included)
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
• Voice dialing
• Adobe Flash 10.2 support
• microHDMI port
In its box, you’ll see the charger, a microUSB cable used for both charging and making data transfers, an 8 GB microSD card, the headphones and some user manuals.
The Xperia Neo measures 116 x 57 x 13 mm and has a weight of 126 g, so it’s pretty slim and light, feeling comfortable in your hand and pockets. Even if it’s entirely made from plastic, the phone seems to be pretty well put together. Its design looks quite nice, having a sleek and a little bit glossy appearance, but standing far from giving a cheap impression. The only thing you’ll notice to be not so pleasing about it is that your fingerprints stick to it and you’ll have to clean it every once in a while or buy a cover for the back.
The frontal part of the phone’s body is dominated by a 3.7 inches LED-backlit LCD capacitive touchscreen that has a resolution of 854 x 480 pixels and a ~265 ppi pixel density. It’s powered by the Sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine and has, for protection, a scratch resistant glass. The colors offered by its display are pretty nice and vibrant, the contrast is good too. You’ll have no problems when looking at it under direct sunlight, as the phone offers a decent performance.
Above the screen, you’ll come across the earpiece, a front facing VGA camera for making video calls and the ambient light and proximity sensors.
Below the display are the hardware controls for Back, Home and Menu.
The left side holds nothing, meanwhile the right side is home for the volume rocker, Power/Lock key with a status LED next to it and the shutter button.
At the top reside the microHDMI and microUSB ports, which are protected by plastic flaps, and the 3.5 mm audio jack.
The Xperia Neo comes loaded with Android 2.3 Gingerbread (which is upgradeable to v4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich) and the Timescape user interface, which gathers your call logs, SMS, MMS, email, Facebook and Twitter updates. You can filter the displayed content by type, this way getting only what’s important for viewing. The phone is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset, holding a 1 GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, 320 MB of internal storage and 512 MB of RAM. Having these specs, the phone’s overall performance is great, offering a very pleasing user experience, without any lag issues, freezes and annoying stuff like that.
At the telephony department, we have a nice phonebook that’s capable of keeping tons of informations about your contacts, syncs with your online accounts (Exchange, Facebook, Twitter) and also has the quick contacts functionality. You have voice calling too and the possibility of making video calls.
The call quality was very good for both parties and I didn’t experience any reception problems either.
At the messaging section, your SMS and MMS are organized into threads and each thread is displayed as a conversation between you and your contact. You can copy, paste, lock your messages against deletion and even search for a certain message in your conversations.
For instant messaging, Google Talk has you all covered up, being compatible with clients like Pidgin, iChat, Kopete and others.
For emailing, you have Gmail, which supports batch operations, and a generic email application, that supports your other email accounts.
Typing is nice and comfy on the phone’s on screen virtual QWERTY keyboard offered by Gingerbread.
The Xperia Neo’s connectivity set features support for quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5/76 Mbps HSUPA, Wi-Fi b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, microUSB 2.0.
For surfing the web, you have a great browser that has support for Flash 10.1, double tap and pinch zooming, text reflow, multiple tabs and switching between them, bookmarks, find on page and others. The overall browsing experience is very nice, as the pages are loaded fast and look nice on the phone’s screen.
The Xperia Neo comes packed with an 8 megapixel autofocus camera that’s capable of taking pictures at a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels and has a single LED flash for helping in low light situations. The camera’s app offers settings for touch focus, face and smile detection, geo-tagging, white balance and others. The image quality is very good, with accurate colors and good amount of detail.
The phone’s video camera is also very capable and it produces 720p videos at 30 fps.
For audio playback, the phone offers you a nice looking music player, which features several equalizer presets, the Infinite key for searching your tracks on YouTube and others. The audio quality is more than decent.
An FM Radio also resides here and comes with RDS support and supports the TrackID app for music recognition.
For watching videos, the phone’s video player only support MP4 and 3GP videos, so you might want to get another one, I suppose. Nevertheless, the image quality is excellent, thanks to the phone’s very capable display.
The Xperia Neo comes with the Office Suite for viewing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF document files. Some other useful apps are the classic Calendar, Calculator, Alarms and others.
A GPS receiver is also here and has A-GPS support. For navigation, the Google Maps application is at your service.
The Xperia Neo has a 1500 mAh battery inside and will stay alive for almost a day and a half of moderate usage (at least, that’s how long it lasted in my hands).
In conclusion, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo is a pretty capable smartphone and will serve you well when it comes to taking pictures, browsing, watching movies and so on, being available at an affordable price.
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