The new Xperia S was announced at CES 2012 in Vegas sporting an dramatic new design and offering a visual feast letting you enjoy all its features in glorious full HD. Take snaps of your mates or surroundings with the 12 MP camera and view them on the gorgeous 4.3 inch crystal clear LCD HD screen which has Sony Mobile Bravia Engine technology for an enhanced contrast, rich colours and a crisper image. And thanks to the screen having reduced light reflection, the picture stays clear when you're outdoors too. The 12MP camera can be snapping pictures in just 1.5 seconds from standby, and you can share them or you can watch your HD videos straight on your HD TV thanks to the Xperia S's easy to use connectivity. The 1.3 MP front facing camera means you can also stay in touch with friends and family via HD video chat. The Xperia S comes with a powerful 1.5GHz dual-core processor beating underneath for faster performance, smoother web browsing and lag-free use. CPU speed: 1.5GHz dual-core processor Platform: AndroidTM 2.3 Network: UMTS/HSPA: 850/900/1900/2100 MHz / Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz / (Band frequency, HSPA availability, and data speed are operator dependent) Memory: Internal phone storage: 32GB / RAM: 1GB Display: 4.3" Reality Display with Mobile BRAVIA® Engine / 16,777,216 colour TFT / 1280x720 pixels GPS: aGPS Connectivity: Bluetooth® / Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11b/g/n / 3.5 mm stereo audio jack / Standard micro-USB / DLNA for wirelessly streaming media from the phone to your TV or computer Camera: 12.1 megapixel camera with F2.4 lens, LED flash / 1080 HD video recording / 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera (720p) MicroSIM and fixed battery Weight: 144.0 grams / 5.1 oz Dimensions: 128.0 × 64.0 × 10.6 mm / 5.0 × 2.5 × 0.4 inches
I consider my self a veteran of Sony Ericsson phones dating back to the X10 to the Arc and now the S. I was waiting and waiting for the Ion promised by Sony and At&T but they decided to ignore the US so since this was available now as an international phone and further investigation revealed this phone would work fine on At&T networks, I decided to get it. I could not bring myself to give this phone 4 stars but I also feel there are a couple real drawbacks from making this a perfect phone but there are no options for 4.5 stars so I have this phone 5 because I love it so much.
First off, the design is classy and can only be rivaled by the IPhone. This phone blows away Samsung phones in terms of design. This is Sony's first phone without dedicated physical buttons for home back and menu. This adds to the physical beauty but unfortunately the touch keys are not as responsive. With practice it almost becomes seamless and unnoticeable but it may become annoying if you don't get the hang of it, luckily I did.
The bar at the bottom of the phone is clear and serves a dual purpose. It serves as an antenna for the phone and also lights up with a light blue light when the phone is activated. This does help because it gives you an indication of where the home, menu and back keys are. Otherwise it is nearly impossible to touch the right spot in the dark. Unfortunately, I feel like Sony missed out a 3rd more useful and fun purpose. The bar could have lit up different colors to show notifications. Instead, the notification light is on the top left hand corner exactly like the X10. Blue is a text message, green is an email. This would have been awesome if there was an option to use the clear bar as notification not just for the pretty aspect of it all but because you could tell if you had a message from any angle. I feel like this flew over Sony's head as being an obvious great use for the bar.
The screen is beyond amazing. Full HD in all it's glory and blows away Iphone's Retina display and Samsung's OLED display. How do I know? My brother has the Iphone and my wife has the Samsung. Comparative views showed no contest people. This is truly the best phone display I have ever seen. I also heard on the internet that the pixel density was better but seeing it is believing it. Trust me, this screen is beautiful.
The camera was quite a disappointing. Megapixels mean absolutely nothing. Sony's 12 megapixel camera lost out to the iphone with my comparative tests. Iphone manage to beat this phone with pics. Not by much but enough for me to tell that Iphone's camera is better. Which is ironic because Iphones camera lens is made by Sony. Anyway, it takes fairly good pictures but certainly wont replace your professional camera. Furthermore, the focusing is excruciatingly slow. It takes a very long time to focus. I also didn't like that there was no option to silence the camera as in prior phones like the arc. The annoying sound could not be muted. The video camera tests fared better and it takes great video.
As far as software goes, Sony in a rare event for them; hit it out of the ball park on the software side. Normally Sony is renound for their hardware beauty but software has always been a weak point for Sony. I'm happy to report they have only improved on their software. Sony has learned it's lesson and did not mettle too much with the Android operating system. The only thing they did was ad a gorgeous skin over the android operating system. I can tell you, this is the best android skin out there without a doubt. Simple and classy. That's it, all they did was make this phone look pretty and with this display, they did a wonderful job. Even the stock screen savers included are gorgeous.
The common apps were also wonderful. The music app is much improved. I used to have a bought dedicated music app no more with this app. It finally has equalizer ability and the sound is Sony quality. they also added a wonderful convenient feature by allowing you to play pause and skip from the lock menu. So you don't have to go through steps to get to the app for these functions. Simply turn on the screen and touch from the lock screen. The other wonderful aspect is the video player. When you plug in your phone to your pc it recognises the phone as an Xperia S and brings up a menu for options such as transfers. I would suggest ignoring that and using your phone as a simple hard drive. All files are there for you to simply drag and drop if you want to add files. When you add video, the phone automatically converts the video to a format playable by the player. Prior SE phones did not have this capability and more importantly it plays HD video! I downloaded an HD movie and it converted the video for play back in all it's HD glory! WOW. Love it!
The phone is also fast. Significantly so thanks to the dual core processor. Comparing my SE Arc with this phone proves that speed has increased significantly thanks to the dual core processor. Web surfing is also quicker. Not much to say about the browser other than it does the job, no wonderful news there.
At this point I would say the phone is perfect but aside from the prior gripes with the camera and lack of dedicated home keys; there are some downsides to the phone. One is that this phone does not have an SD card slot for memory expansion. It already comes with a generous 32 gb memory but the potential to expand another 32 gb for total of 64 would have been awesome. The Sony ION had that capability but It is not as attractive as this phone and I got sick of waiting for a good Sony phone. So for those that want that ability, be prepared to wait. It also has a built in battery so there is no ability to swap batteries or have extras. Luckily, the battery life on this phone is pretty good lasting pretty much all day with normal use. Those are the major draw backs. It also is only capable of 3g speeds no LTE as the Sony ION is expected to have. For me, these are things I can live with.
Another aspect that had me asking a lot of questions is the ability for this phone to even work as it is an international phone. Rest assured, this phone works perfectly fine with 3g on AT&T's network. The nice thing about AT&T is that their network is universal so the phone works great. The bad news is that I don't think this phone works perfectly with any other network. I heard it does not work with verizon at all and T-mobile only works on 2g. If you have AT&T it will work perfectly. The other thing is that this phone only takes Micro Sim cards. That's an easy fix, just cut your regular sim card so it fits. The best way to do this is to get a sim card cutter sold on amazon. It's like a hole punch for sim cards.
I've had this phone for a month and waited to review it so that I would be very familiar with all functionality and report any and all problems I have had with it. This phone is truly awesome and my brother extremely envious after our comparative display tests. It's a shame Sony phones do not have traction in the US but at least I have one of the most unique and pretty phones out there. Plus no contract! You have to pay a pretty penny for it but if you can, it's totally worth it.
****UPDATE***** Well, I dropped my phone in the water. It miraculously survived with the only exception of the speaker. The call speakers still work. The reason I am writing this is because I bought the ION through AT & T at 99 dollars and realized how good the unlocked international S is after trying out the ION. I will not go into a review of the ION but what I will say is that AT & T has a habit of ruining good phones. I was so dissatisfied with he phone and experience that I decided to return it. At 99 dollars it is a bargain and if you don't have the money to buy an unlocked phone I would not blame you but that's how good the S is. I decided to keep a crippled phone.
0 nhận xét:
Post a Comment