Sony Xperia S

This phone is fast on the uptake, and no mobile screen can match the sharpness of its display

The first thing you notice about Xperia S is its beautiful design: a big black screen and transparent band touting the name Xperia. The second thing you notice is that there is no Ericsson label (it’s gone).

Design finesse has been central to Sony products, and it shows in this phone. In the looks department, it combines brain and brawn. It looks better in your hand than in a picture.

The scratch-resistant 4.3 inch touchscreen has a range of 16 million colours. It has 342 pixels per sq inch, and no other mobile phone screen can boast such a figure. The display is not only bright, its sharpness is unsurpassed.

The camera is similarly spec smart. This 12 megapixel shooter is backed up by an LED flash. The front camera is a 1.3 megapixel one and lets you shoot clips of up to 780 pixels at 30 frames per second, and allows Skype conversations with high-definition video.

Sony says its camera is the fastest on any smartphone today. Its sleep-to-shoot time is said to be 1.5 seconds, and time between two shots only about one second. While I was unable to score these times for camera wake-up and consecutive shots, I must still say that the camera really is very fast. On the flip side, while it features Sony’s award-winning Exmor R sensor, the camera sadly lacks a macro mode and multipoint focus feature. While these would have made the camera easier to use, the pictures are clear, crisp and vivid nonetheless. It has 3D and 2D panorama modes, and I have no major complaints about these two.

Sony has chosen a 1.5 GHz dual core processor for this phone. There is 32 GB of internal memory and no SD card slot—and its storage can’t be expanded. The back cover opens up only for the insertion of a Micro-SIM card. And beautiful as it is, I think the cover looks very flimsy. But maybe it is not, as Sony says that the phone (including the back cover) has an anti-stain coating so that lipstick or mustard stains don’t stay.

The phone runs on Android 2.3 and can be upgraded to the latest version of Android that will be launched sometime in the next few months.

The battery lasted me seven hours, and the conversations were always clear. It comes in black and white options. I love the white.

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