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