Sony Xperia T review

Considering it’s the phone 007 will be using in Skyfall later this year, it should come as no surprise that the Xperia T is a high-end smartphone that’s packed with features. It’s a formidable high-end device on paper, with a dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 4.6in HD display and 13-megapixel camera, but specifications alone won’t be enough to give Sony the all-conquering handset it has been seeking since buying out Ericsson earlier in the year.

Rejecting the angular lines seen in the Sony Xperia S, the Xperia T instead opts for a more textured rear and curved edges. These help it sit comfortably in your hand, despite the phone’s size and weight – at 139g it’s heavier than Apple, HTC and Samsung’s flagship phones and at 9.4mm it’s thicker too. Sat side by side, the Xperia certainly sticks out, but it’s hardly an ugly duckling. Our review unit came in two-tone sliver and black, though we much prefer the all-black version of the handset.

The machined metal power, volume and camera buttons are a nice touch, although their positioning feels too low down the right side of the device – you have to stretch your thumb awkwardly or hold the phone at an angle to reach them if you’re right handed, although it’s less of a problem for lefties.

The entire unit is sealed, so there’s no way to remove the battery, but there is at least a MicroSD card slot next to the MicroSIM card slot for future expansion if you use up the 16GB of internal storage. Unfortunately it’s covered by a rather flimsy plastic flap that might get damaged if caught when pulling the phone out of a pocket or bag. The headphone jack on the top and microUSB port on the left side are both uncovered – the latter also doubles as an HDMI output using an MHL adaptor. Wireless connectivity includes 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DLNA support, Wi-Fi Direct and NFC.

Depending how you hold your phone these buttons are either perfectly placed or awkward to use

Sony has used on-screen buttons rather than physical ones, meaning the 4.6in LCD display takes up the entire front face of the phone. It’s a beauty, thanks to the 1,280×720 resolution and Sony’s own Bravia mobile engine display tweaks which improve image and video playback by sharpening pictures, increasing contrast and removing digital noise. It works brilliantly, rendering text sharply, giving icons a crisp appearance and really showing off your photos. It can be a little tricky to see in bright sunlight, and the screen itself is a magnet for dust and fingerprints, but these aren’t major issues.

With Sony finally switching over to ICS, the Xperia T feels much more like a flagship phone than the Xperia S did with Android 2.3. The various tweaks made to the stock Android interface are refreshingly minimal, with Sony instead concentrating on its widgets and pre-installed apps. Timescape makes a reappearance and is heavily integrated with Facebook, letting you swipe between status updates on the homescreen. The TrackID service lets you identify any piece of music, Sony Select suggests apps, music and films to try, Movie Studio is a fool-proof way to edit video clips and WisePilot provides turn-by-turn navigation.

The 4.6in screen is expansive, although the software buttons steal some of that space

Thankfully, many of the bundled apps can be uninstalled without the help of a third party app, so we quickly removed the EA games hub and Astro file manager, which is a trial version only that can’t open compressed folders or select multiple files. Sony’s new Walkman music player is very slick, but if you’ve already moved all your tracks to the cloud you’ll still need to download Google music, as the two don’t work together.

As well as the standard ICS multi-tasking, Sony has also added several small apps that let you take notes, record your voice, start a timer or open a calculator over the top of any existing app. There’s a Google Play store link to add more, but there currently aren’t any further examples available.

Scoring a mammoth 1793.7 in the Quadrant benchmark, the Xperia T is unquestionably fast. The dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 processor makes short work of GLbench too, scoring 4827 overall, although the Adreno GPU won’t be able to render the fancy effects seen in many Tegra-enabled games. It felt incredibly snappy in everyday use as well, even when all five homescreens were filled with widgets.

The camera lens protrudes outwards and is something of a dust magnet

As we would expect from a Sony smartphone, the camera is easily one of the Xperia T’s highlights. Launching in around a second, either from a hard press of the shutter button or a swipe from the lock screen, the 13-megapixel sensor can take superb pictures and is also equipped for Full HD video recording at 1080p. The sweep panorama mode first seen in Sony’s NEX compact cameras makes an appearance here, although it struggles to get a lock in low-light. Even though it has an LED flash, low light shooting proved to be a problem in general, with hit or miss results that often resulted in washed out or blurry images that lacked detail. Stick to bright subjects, however, and the results are impressive.

Battery life was something of a disappointment, as the Xperia T could only manage five and a quarter hours in our video playback test. Sony claims it’s good for seven hours of talk time, 16 for music playback or 400 in standby, but it still falls short against the competition.

The Xperia T gets a lot of things right, including performance, its camera and Sony’s implementation of Android, but it doesn’t quite have that wow factor. It feels slightly chunky in the hand, even if it’s only slightly thicker and heavier than the HTC One X or Samsung Galaxy S3. Looks aside, it’s a powerful phone that does everything you would expect from a high-end Android device, but even then its mediocre battery score means that the Galaxy S3 is still a better buy at current prices.