Sony Xperia P review

Sony Xperia P review

 

The handset seem to be a good cometitor to its similarly priced rival to the Windows Phone-defining Nokia Lumia 800, with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread-packing smartphone and a fighting 1GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core processor that powers the 4-inch handset's show.

 Sony Mobile India MD, P. Balaji, said: “The Xperia smartphones have been designed around user experiences of listen, watch, play and create and share to improve their personal, professional and social life. The Sola smart phone boasts of 'floating touch' for accessing web services by holding any finger on the screen to open the links."

Design

At a glance, the Sony Xperia P looks a slightly smaller version of the Xperia S. It has curved back side, the sharp edges, the glowing transparent strip at the bottom of the device the bar actually houses the back, home and menu shortcut keys. The smartphone looks just as attractive and wonderfully designed. The phone feels solid without being too heavy and it's refreshing to see the use of what feel like high quality materials.

Xperia P has a difference; instead of plastic it comes with an aluminum shell, which covers most of its back side, with the exception of areas where antennas are located. The coldness of the anodized metal is sensed by your fingertips makes you feel that. There is no microSD card slot and the non-removable battery seems to be a definite let down. With a thickness of 10.5 millimeters, the smartphone is not too thick. 

Though it not too large for a normal hand, at times it becomes difficult to handle it with one hand, as the thumb would find itself unreachable till the head of the phone due to its elongated bottom.  Otherwise its physical buttons are responsive to the touch and the 2-stage camera shutter is really convenient when taking pictures.

Display

Xperia P comes on floor with 935 nits, and outdoor  visibility amazing  even when kept in the sun  . This is all due to Sony’s very own WhiteMagic technology which does provide a real benefit as it adds an additional white sub pixel to the standard RGB panel, and is for the first time in a smartphone.

T screen exhibits a great level of detail due to its 275ppi pixel density, 540 by 960 pixels (qHD) (resolution) spread over the screen. Things look nice and sharp, from tiniest of text fonts to the smooth curves of home screen icons.

Till the time brightness is set to a high level, whites appear  yellowish, but once the display is glowing near its maximum, shades of yellow start looking greenish still, the user won't be noticing these flaws all the time due to their dependency on the brightness setting, which gets adjusted automatically by default

 

Software/UI:

Sony Xperia P has Timescape UI running on it. With a similar no updated phone running on Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread, which quite frustrating still Sony has announced an update around the summer.

In portrait mode, we find the on-screen keyboard a bit tricky to use, so typos can be common. Thankfully, the auto-correct feature will take care of them on the fly, and the auto-complete bar can be quite useful.

For the social networking consumers, the Timescape app will surely come in handy. This comes in with an aggregation of  Facebook and Twitter feeds for easy following of friends' activity, and the widgets it is accompanied by make doing so even more convenient. The Recommender app is also a useful feature to use.

 

Processor

Sony Xperia P out of the box with a 1GHz dual-core processor – the NovaThor U8500 by ST Ericsson, the Sony Xperia P has no troubles performing routine tasks when it comes equipped with a whole gigabyte of RAM. Which is correct in case of static live wallpaper is used, but live wallpapers introduce a slight lag when navigating through menus and home screens. On playing 3D game – Frontline Commando and it runs without any difficulties. 

Memory

the lack of microSD  slot has drown back Xperia U and Xperia p but this phone comes with a microSD , the 16 gigabytes of on-board storage should. This should fill most need until and unless they shoot too much 1080p video, as every minute of footage occupies roughly 100 megabytes of storage space. The user-available storage is only 11.26GB for files, documents, and media, and 2GB allocated for installed applications.

Camera

The Sony Xperia P has a well equipped 8-megapixel camera. The images are rich in detail and the color balance is accurate enough. The automatic scene selection worked pretty well so in 9 out of 10 cases we ended up with a properly exposed photograph. When taking photos indoors, image quality degrades noticeably, yet low-light smartphone photos rarely look good as a whole.

When light is  plentiful, focusing time are very short and the shutter lag is under half a second. In low-light conditions, however, the camera surely takes its time, which is why focusing can take well over a second.

By holding down the dedicated camera button, you can take photos straight from the lock screen, and it is nice to see that the feature works like a charm almost every time. Less than 2 seconds are required for the camera to boot up, to focus on an object, and to capture a frame.

As far as videos are concerned, 1080p footage looks okay, but the continuous auto-focus rarely serves its purpose if a close-by object is introduced in front of the camera. There is a front-facing VGA camera present, but its quality is mediocre at best.