Sony Xperia U

The Good: The Sony Xperia U is slim and portable smartphone with solid body construction, clear display, fast and smooth user interface and has a nice music player.

The Bad: Terrible 720p video, no SD card slot, only 4GB internal storage and stiff camera button.

The Bottom Line: The Sony Xperia U is the smaller version in Xperia NXT series. The Xperia NXT series includes Sony Xperia S and Sony Xperia P. The Xperia U is an entry level smartphone which offers better performance with fast processor and has a solid built for firm grip.

Design: The Sony Xperia U is designed to appeal to consumers who love personalizing their devices; consumers can indulge by changing the bottom caps on the smartphone, or see the illuminating transparent element changing color to match the color of the picture or theme on the phone screen.

Above the 3.5 inch screen it has a front-facing VGA camera, which produces low-resolution images at 640x480 pixels. At the right hand side it has power, volume rocker and camera button. At left hand side it has USB connector for power and data transfer and on top it has 3.5 mm audio jack.

Processor and Operating System: It is powered by 1 GHz STE U8500 Dual-Core processor, paired with 512 MB of RAM and runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, can be upgraded to latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Screen: It features 3.5 inch ‘Reality Display’ with company’s own WhiteMagic display technology powered by Mobile BRAVIA Engine for ultra-bright image.

Camera: The device comes with 5 MP camera which is little disappointing because last year Sony launched Xperia Ray with 8 MP camera at a same price tag.

The camera featuring geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, 3D sweep panorama and image stabilization.

Storage and Connectivity: It comes with 8 GB built-in memory but only 4 GB is available for users and sadly no SD card for expandable memory.

For connectivity it has microUSB 2.0, HDMI port DLNA, NFC (Near Field Communications), WiFi Hotspot and Bluetooth.

Battery: The phone get power from 1320 mAh battery, that supports up to 6 hours of talktime when the phone is used on the 2G network and up to 5 hours of talktime on the 3G network.

Wrap-Up: The Xperia U has a Dual-Core 1GHz processor, and we had no complaints about its performance. We like its 3.5 inch bright and sharp display which is easy to see and use, even outdoors. But the 4 GB internal memory is something insufficient for music junkies to store lots of media files.

The only noticeable drawback is its 720p video recording and lack of storage functionality apart from that it’s a worth buying smartphone.

By Vamshi Krishna