Sony Xperia T review

With Sony finally switching over to ICS, the Xperia T feels much more like a flagship phone than the Xperia S did with Android 2.3. The various tweaks made to the stock Android interface are refreshingly minimal, with Sony instead concentrating on its widgets and pre-installed apps. Timescape makes a reappearance and is heavily integrated with Facebook, letting you swipe between status updates on the homescreen. The TrackID service lets you identify any piece of music, Sony Select suggests apps, music and films to try, Movie Studio is a fool-proof way to edit video clips and WisePilot provides turn-by-turn navigation.

The 4.6in screen is expansive, although the software buttons steal some of that space

Thankfully, many of the bundled apps can be uninstalled without the help of a third party app, so we quickly removed the EA games hub and Astro file manager, which is a trial version only that can’t open compressed folders or select multiple files. Sony’s new Walkman music player is very slick, but if you’ve already moved all your tracks to the cloud you’ll still need to download Google music, as the two don’t work together.

As well as the standard ICS multi-tasking, Sony has also added several small apps that let you take notes, record your voice, start a timer or open a calculator over the top of any existing app. There’s a Google Play store link to add more, but there currently aren’t any further examples available.

Scoring a mammoth 1793.7 in the Quadrant benchmark, the Xperia T is unquestionably fast. The dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 processor makes short work of GLbench too, scoring 4827 overall, although the Adreno GPU won’t be able to render the fancy effects seen in many Tegra-enabled games. It felt incredibly snappy in everyday use as well, even when all five homescreens were filled with widgets.

The camera lens protrudes outwards and is something of a dust magnet

As we would expect from a Sony smartphone, the camera is easily one of the Xperia T’s highlights. Launching in around a second, either from a hard press of the shutter button or a swipe from the lock screen, the 13-megapixel sensor can take superb pictures and is also equipped for Full HD video recording at 1080p. The sweep panorama mode first seen in Sony’s NEX compact cameras makes an appearance here, although it struggles to get a lock in low-light. Even though it has an LED flash, low light shooting proved to be a problem in general, with hit or miss results that often resulted in washed out or blurry images that lacked detail. Stick to bright subjects, however, and the results are impressive.

Battery life was something of a disappointment, as the Xperia T could only manage five and a quarter hours in our video playback test. Sony claims it’s good for seven hours of talk time, 16 for music playback or 400 in standby, but it still falls short against the competition.

The Xperia T gets a lot of things right, including performance, its camera and Sony’s implementation of Android, but it doesn’t quite have that wow factor. It feels slightly chunky in the hand, even if it’s only slightly thicker and heavier than the HTC One X or Samsung Galaxy S3. Looks aside, it’s a powerful phone that does everything you would expect from a high-end Android device, but even then its mediocre battery score means that the Galaxy S3 is still a better buy at current prices.