Sony Xperia L , I have bought for my brother, but before handing over to him I have used it for 2 to 3 weeks as my daily driver, just to check if the phone doesn’t have any issues, so based on the usage , let me break it down to what’s good and what not good.
What’s good in the phone-
+ First all , understand this is a budget handset, so something or the other is compromised for lowering the price.
+ Design is brilliant, HTC and Sony are the two company’s out there that try something new with their design , and being specific with this phone, I just love it, its a unique looking handset and it looks great.
+ The size of the phone and screen is perfect, its a 4.3 inch screen, which makes one handed use more easy and comfortable.
+ The phone has one of the best graphic card ( Andreno 305) in this price bracket , all the high end games works brilliant, I tried Asphalt , Riptide etc and all works just fine and no loss of frame rate.
+ Battery life is good ( on average use , can take you through a day) and turning on the stamina mode , helps the battery life even more , what’s interesting is when the battery runs even lower its asks you to turn on low-battery settings and saves battery for you ...
+ The phone comes with 8GB internal storage and has removable battery and expandable storage .
+ Its comes with SOny Walkman , which is one of the best looking music app I have seen with all the great graphic and visualizer.
+ Its comes with Jelly Bean 4.1.2 , so has all the Google Now features.
+ NFC , though I don’t use it , but a good feature to have, if the future permits it.
+ 3G receiver was okie and could pick up the speed sometimes, but I was using my wife’s TATA docomo sim , which is not that of a great range in my area, so can’t comment on its capabilities.
+ Day to Day usage, the android running on it is little snappy, it works perfectly with good speed b/w pages , but there is once in a while slowness , but its something that we can ignore and continue working , not a great deal breaker..
+ The sound quality and speakers are also good.
What I dont like.
+ First the camera , its one of the main disappoint on the phone , although its spots 8MP camera , the quality of the pictures are really bad.
+ The Camera takes okie picture at daylight ( can post on social site , but not for print ) , but night its not good at all.
+ The front facing camera is even worst , it reminds me of the VGA camera that we used to spot long back with Nokia 6600.
+ Another biggest disappointment was the storage, the Phone ships in which 8GB storage internally , Sony has spitted the storage and defined 1.5 G for system (calling its a SYSTEM STORAGE) and remaining as "internal SD" , so its means the phone has 1.5GB has the main storage , this made the apps that couldn’t be moved to SD card remained on 1.5G limit adding to the worry of system space being filled.
+ Now the apps that could be moved, could only be moved to internal SD card and not to external SD card , so no real advantage of having a bigger SD card to load some high/big games.
+ Now the external SD card that I have placed, cannot be used to move the apps in (unless rooted), it can only be used to store photos, videos and musics files. (This seems to be a feature of all SOny phones even on Sony Xperia Z , so user beware while buying SONY smartphones)
+ The screen resolution is very low , I could easily spot pixels on the text , but if you are first time user to smartphone and have not used any 720p or 1080p screens then you will hardly notice.
+ The screen is not that bright, I always assumed the screen to be dull and the blacks are not too deep and always shown as dark grey.
+ The SONY UI lacks the punch, after minutes of usage I hated it and installed third party launcher like NOVA.
+ Many Sony unrelated apps like Sony Live etc, which I hardly use, can’t uninstalled them either.
+ The device all though from google, never shipped with Navigation app, a big disappointment.
+ The GPS when turned on, it couldn’t locate my location on Maps, not sure if that is even working and another big let down.
Conclusion :
Since this was brought for my brother (he loves games and whats app), this was a great buy , because it has a high GPU..Other option in this price bracket was LG Optimus L9 , but the GPU isn’t superior and its cant play the game as smoothly as Xperia L also it runs Ice cream Sandwich.
So buy if you like to play games/browsing/Android Jelly Bean/don’t like big screen and social person .
Opt out of it and go for LG optimus L9, if you are not into Games/Travelling and use Navigation/Screen Resolution / and larger battery life/and take pictures.
Thanks