Sony Xperia SP

The Register has published a very positive review of Sony's mid-range Android smartphone.

Snippets follow:

"You can pick one up unlocked for £300 and on PAYG for £50 less. For that you get a 4.6-inch, 1280 x 720 Gorilla Glass-covered screen; a 2370mAh battery; 8GB of storage with a microSD slot for more; an 8MP camera; a dual-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Krait-class Snapdragon processor; and an Adreno 320 GPU. That’s all the smartphone many people - including me - will ever want or need."

"Thanks to Sony’s Mobile Bravia Engine 2 processing, which makes good on its boasts of enhancing contrast and sharpness, reducing noise and improving colour saturation, videos look good."

"The Qualcomm S4 Pro MSM8960T SoC turned in a respectable AnTuTu score of 15,500, while a test of JavaScript performance in the Chrome browser with SunSpider threw up an equally decent 1200ms. In the real world you needn’t worry about any performance giveaways to the current crop of quad-core superphones because frankly there aren’t any."

"The UI is consistently fluid and even demanding games run cleanly. That’s mainly down to the Adreno 320 GPU, which is the same graphics chip used in the Xperia Z, UK-spec Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. I ran the Epic Citadel demo which uses the Unreal Engine 3 and got very similar average frames-per-second numbers to the S4."

"With a dual- rather than quad-core processor, the battery takes less of a shafting. With it being unusually capacious by the standards of this, or any other price, category, I was able to get the thick end of two days of general use from one charge."

"The 8MP main shooter produced results that were rather noisy and showed less than perfect colour balance, while the webcam’s 0.3MP (640 x 480) resolution is low by modern standards."
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