Sony Brings the Beat Back

The new Sony Xperia S, or Sola as it’s also known, is a leap-forward for Sony in the smartphone world. It’s a funky-looking phone that is pitched at the mid-level competition, but as it’s Sony there are certainly a few technological tricks up its sleeve. The more and more you use and play with the Xperia the more fun and impressive it becomes. It might not strike you immediately as a pretty phone but it grows on you and draws your attention in other ways until you’re completely under its spell.

For starters it runs on the Gingerbread operating system although most people will want to upgrade to the deeply-impressive (but battery-sucking) Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 OS. With a dual core processor and 1GHz of power it’s by no means slow but there are faster and more impressive units out there already. With just your fingertips you can use the multi-touch screen that has floating tiles which can be personalised to your tastes so you have all your most important apps on the home screen.

With a 3.5” screen it’s perfectly-sized compared to the competition and the Reality Display adds a futuristic feel to the overall quality of the screen. With 8GB of on-board storage and the option of a microSD card you’re never going to run out of memory. It’s got a 5-megapixel camera as well as an HD video camera so you can take brilliant pictures and videos on the move. As Sony’s standalone digital cameras are impressive, you get the panoramic sweep effect, face-tagging, smile detection and blink detection too. It’s also connected to the Sony Entertainment Network that has a myriad of music and videos to download to watch whenever you like.

As Sony are well-known in the electronics industry for developing TVs, music players and a whole host of other things, the icing on the cake for the Sony Xperia S is the audio. Bringing beats to your ears is the stunning and deeply impressive xLoud 3D. It is featured in the multimedia speakers for TVs and music players and creates a surround sound effect without having to have tonnes of speakers. It bounces sound waves off the walls to create the same effect which is very cool especially from a tiny smartphone. It adds depth to the sound and creates a much better sound than you’ve probably ever witnessed from a small device. Coupled with the BRAVIA screen technology you can expect to watch videos and movies on your new smartphone with great effect, and compared to the competition it’s certainly leading the way when it comes to audio-visual features.

While it is more known for its audio it’s still an impressive smartphone as an all-rounder. There are others that are better at certain things but Sony is an enormous company and wouldn’t churn out a poor phone so you know when you buy One you’re getting all of that experience and reputation rolled into One neat little phone. Although the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S3 might steal the limelight this year, there are plenty of reasons to opt for a Sony.