Sony Xperia S preview: Game on

Introduction

In staging their grand return, Sony Mobile could've done a lot worse than the Xperia S. The fresh divorcees are back on the market, their new Xperia flagship kindly supplying the bang. And while the HD screen and dual-core processor are not exactly breaking news, there's an extensive set of features to make a geek's heart flutter.

   
Sony Xperia S official photos

The Sony Xperia S aims for camera excellence with 12MP still photography and 1080p video recording. It has an HD screen and a microHDMI port, not to mention a dedicated TV Launcher that lets you control the phone with your TV remote.

The Xperia S is a high-performance phone too - while quad-core phones will soon hit the shelves, the dual-core 1.5GHz processor and Adreno 220 GPU show good results in early benchmarks.

We'll do a first round of benchmarks later, but let's have a closer look at the specs of the Sony Xperia S first.

Sony Xperia S at a glance:

• General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 850/900/1900/2100 MHz, 14.4 Mbps HSDPA, 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
• Form factor: Touchscreen bar phone
• Dimensions: 128 x 64 x 10.6 mm, 144 g
• Display: 4.3" 16M-color TFT capacitive touchscreen, 720 x 1280 pixels
• CPU: Qualcomm MSM8260 chipset, dual-core 1.5 GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 220 GPU
• OS: Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), planned 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update
• Memory: 32GB of storage, 1GB of RAM
• Camera: 12 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash, face detection and touch focus; 1080p video recording at 30fps; 1.3MP front-facing camera with 720p video recording, sweep multi-angle shots for lenticular print effect
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA; Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack, microHDMI port
• Misc: Sony Timescape UI, TV launcher, built-in accelerometer, proximity sensor, Sony Mobile Bravia engine, multi-touch input, scratch-resistant surface, microSIM only

Not quite like the Sony Ericsson Xperia arcs, is it? The Xperia S is better in almost every respect, save for thickness. Still, considering how thick those old 12MP shooters were (especially around the camera), 10.6mm sounds great.

The screen on the Xperia S deserves praise too. The 4.3" BRAVIA LCD of 720p resolution is up there with the best screens on the market. At 342ppi, it's definitely one of the sharpest.

   
Sony Xperia S live pictures

There's a lot to test on the Sony Xperia S, but we'll only have time to cover only some of the aspects in this preview. Let's not waste any more time and jump straight to the hardware.

Standard accessories in the box

The Sony Xperia S came in a large box with the standard set of accessories - a charger, a microUSB cable and an in-ear headset.

The Xperia S box

A microHDMI cable would've been most welcome, but no luck on this one.

Sony Xperia S 360-degree spin

The Sony Xperia S measures 128 x 64 x 10.6 mm and is a bit on the heavy side at 144 g, even for a phone with a 4.3" screen.

Design and build quality

The Xperia S design is a combination of square angles and curves. A strip of transparent plastic at the bottom, which lights up when the display is on, is a prominent accent. A fusion of form and function, this element also holds the antenna.

  
The Sony Xperia S is quite the looker

The screen on the Sony Xperia S promises great things and it delivers - it's mesmerizingly sharp, with punchy colors and very good contrast. It's backed by BRAVIA engine which, as we've seen before, does very well on screens with high pixel-density - and the Xperia S display is one of the most pixel-rich at 342ppi.

Its only downside (and it's not a minor one) is the poor viewing angles.

 
The Reality display boasts excellent picture quality

Above the screen is the SONY logo styled with their instantly recognizable font (unlike the "Sony" in "Sony Ericsson"). The earpiece is below it along with other bits of gadgetry.

There's a 1.3MP front-facing camera that can record 720p video, along with proximity and ambient light sensors and a charge indicator.

The earpiece and its companions

Below the screen, there are three tiny dots marking the three capacitive keys (Back, Home and Menu). The actual icons are within the transparent strip, so you might try to push those instead (like we did). It takes a while to get used to that.

The transparent strip has a cool white backlight, which makes it an attractive design element in the dark.

The three dots are the standard Android keys

The two wired ports - microUSB and microHDMI - are on the sides of the phone. Both are hidden under plastic flaps to protect them from dust.

The right side of the Sony Xperia S holds several other elements too - a not-so-comfortable volume rocker and a shutter key.

The Xperia arc S had a rather unpleasant shutter key and while this one is better, it's still not perfect. It's thin and has a low profile, but at least it's easy to press (stiff keys like on the arc S can lead to camera shake). The stop between half-press and full-press can be hard to feel sometimes though.

   
microUSB port on the left • microHDMI port, volume rocker and shutter key on the right

The Power/Lock key and the 3.5mm audio jack are on the top. The audio jack is left uncovered, but that makes sense since it will probably see plenty of use.

There's nothing of interest at the bottom besides the lanyard eyelet.

   
The Power/Lock key and the 3.5mm audio jack are on top • Lanyard eyelet on the bottom

The back of the Xperia S features the star of the show - the 12MP camera. It's located very near the top edge, which means you'll have to be very careful not to put a finger over it when taking a photo.

The camera is accompanied by a single-LED flash and the secondary microphone used when shooting video. The loudspeaker grille is also here.

 
You should mind your fingers when shooting

The back cover is made of soft matte plastic, which feels good and hides fingerprints well.

Removing the back cover doesn't reveal much - you'll find the microSIM card here, but you don't get to see the battery. What you would find is an aluminum frame painted black, similar to the Xperia ray.

The battery is a 1750 mAh unit, which is said to provide about 450 hours of 2G stand-by (420 hours in 3G) or up to 7 hours and 30 minutes of talk time in 2G (8 hours and 30 minutes in 3G).

We liked the clean design of the Sony Xperia S. The transparent strip is a unique accent and subtle enough (the Xperia pureness must be glad a small part of it lives on).

The curved back fits nicely in the hand, but again doesn't overdo it and make the phone thick (like some of those Human Curvature designs). It's fairly compact and pocketable, you can take it anywhere - much more portable than a point-and-shoot camera, so it's always with you (they say that's the best possible feature on a camera).

 
Handling the Sony Xperia S

User interface - Android Gingerbread again

The Sony Xperia S has received a slightly revamped custom skin, but it's still Gingerbread underneath (2.3.7). It will be updated to Ice Cream Sandwich, of course, along with others in the Xperia line.

We have a video of the user interface in action, which is a good starting point.

As usual the Xperia S has a five-pane homescreen (you can't add or delete panes), with four docked shortcuts (two on either side of the launcher shortcut). Those are visible on all five homescreen panes and are user configurable: they can be either single icons or folders with multiple items in them.

  
The Sony Xperia S UI

The homescreen does a neat trick called Overview mode. Pinch to zoom out on any of the 5 homescreen panes and a new screen opens up with a cool transition. All your widgets gather there and you can click the one you want and go to its screen.

The Overview mode helps you find the widget you are looking for

The Xperia S has some custom-made Sony widgets in addition to the standard set. Those include the Timescape widget (there's a dedicated app too) and a Mediascape-like widget for photos and videos (the actual app isn't there anymore, the standard gallery is back).

The lockscreen shows notifications for Facebook events too. A cool new addition to the lockscreen, unseen before in the Xperia line, is the music player widget, which lets you control music playback without unlocking the phone.

The standard notification area and task switcher are of course present and accounted for - no custom touches to them.

   
The lockscreen • Lockscreen notifications • The standard notification area and task switcher

Synthetic benchmark

With quad-cores just around the corner, you'd be forgiven for having doubts about the Xperia S, but Sony have actually done quite well at squeezing the best possible performance out of it.

In CPU-intensive benchmarks, the two 1.5GHz Scorpion cores behave admirably, with results close to the Galaxy S II and ahead of a good deal of the competition, including an HTC Sensation XE on the same chipset.

 

The Adreno 220 isn't exactly the most powerful GPU around, but Sony have managed to get the best out of it - 37.5fps in NenaMark 2 is a playable framerate, despite the high resolution (the 720p Xperia S screen has 140% more pixels than the WVGA screen of the Galaxy S II, for example).

The SunSpider and BrowserMark browser benchmarks report better performance than other Gingerbread phones, but can't match the highly optimized Ice Cream Sandwich browser (at least not until the ICS update).

 

12MP sharpshooter with a pinch of 3D

The Xperia S boasts a 12 megapixel camera, complete with a single LED light. Much like previous Xperia phones, the S uses a backlit Exmor R sensor for improved low-light performance.

The camera controls on the Xperia S are available on two taskbars on either side of the viewfinder. The left one holds four shortcuts to various settings, while the right one shows the still/video toggle, the virtual shutter and a thumbnail of the last photo taken.

The menu key brings up two pages of extra settings - scenes, resolution, smile detection, geotagging, image stabilization and focus mode and others. You can customize three of the shortcuts on the left (the shooting mode shortcut is fixed).

 
 
The Xperia S camera interface

There're five capture modes to choose from: Normal, Scene recognition, Sweep Panorama, Sweep Multi Angle and 3D Sweep Panorama. In Normal, you pick the Scene settings manually or you can enable Scene recognition and let the Xperia S take a guess (it's fairly good at it).

 
Several shooting modes, including two 3D ones • Shooting a Multi Angle image

The 3D Sweep Panorama is business as usual - you press the shutter key and sweep the phone from left to right and you get a panoramic photo in the end that can be viewed in 2D or 3D (on a compatible TV).

The Sweep Multi Angle was much more impressive - you take a photo in the exact same way, but the result is very different. It produces something like a lenticular card.

Tilting the phone left and right lets you look at the object from different sides. A shot of a moving object looks like an animated GIF or creates interesting distortions, which can be pretty funny too.

 
Tilting the phone left and right rotates the camera slightly in the opposite direction

There are some distortions visible even with a static scene, but it's still one of the coolest camera features we've seen in a while. Photos taken in Sweep Multi Angle mode are handled by a separate app called 3D album, and not listed in the regular gallery. And just to make it clear again - the Xperia S screen is not a 3D one.

The Xperia S features a Quick launch option, which lets you customize the phone's behavior upon a press of the camera key when the phone is locked. The default option is Launch and capture - it unlocks the phone, starts the camera and instantly snaps a photo.

It's hard to frame the shot right, but you can quickly take another photo, as the camera reloads quite fast. There's an option that just unlocks the phone and starts the camera, if that's what you prefer, or you can disable the feature completely.

We won't be delving into image quality, we'll leave that for a complete review. You can check out camera samples from an impromptu shootout between the Xperia S and the Nokia N8.

  
  
A couple of Sony Xperia S camera samples

Here are four samples shot with the Nokia N8. Don't forget that you can open two photos at once and click to lock a particular part of shot (so that it doesn't move or zoom out when you move your mouse), which makes it easier to compare the images.

  
Some of the same scenes shot with the Nokia N8

Xperia line joins the FullHD race

The Sony Xperia S captures 1080p video at 30 fps and does a very good job of it. The camcorder has similar settings to the still camera, including focus mode, metering, exposure value, image stabilization and so on. The layout of the shortcuts can be customized here too.

The Xperia S camcorder features continuous autofocus. It may take a few seconds to refocus after you re-frame but that's better than repeating attempts to lock focus that may ruin a video.

 
Switching to camcorder mode

Videos are stored in MP4 format (14Mbps bitrate) and the frame rate nails the 30fps mark. The Xperia S videos come with stereo sound recorded at 128Kbps bitrate and 48kHz sampling.

Check out the 720p samples that we captured with the Xperia S:

If you want to look closer at the video quality, you can download this untouched sample 1080p@30fps, taken straight off the device.

Impressive connectivity

The Sony Xperia S is well versed in modern connectivity. It doesn't have LTE like the Xperia ion, but it does offer quad-band 2G and quad-band 3G. Mobile data speeds are boosted by 14.4Mbps HSDPA and 5.76Mbps HSUPA.

Local connectivity is covered by Wi-Fi b/g/n with Wi-Fi Direct support, that enables file transfer between devices with an easy setup.

The Xperia S also supports DLNA, so you can easily play media (photos, videos, music) from DLNA-enabled storage devices or push content from your phone to a DLNA TV or music player.

   
The Connected Devices app handles the DLNA functionality

Bluetooth is also onboard, but the boring 2.1 version (although Wi-Fi Direct makes up for the lack of BT v3.0).

Then there's NFC support - you can use it to read NFC tags but also make the phone act as a tag itself. You can create multiple tags and choose which one you want to share. A tag can be anything from contact info (usually yours so you can send it as a sort of wireless business card), a URL or just plain text.

The Xperia S saves NFC tags you've scanned with it and you can even star some of them for easier access later.

  
The Tags app lets you scan and create your own NFC tags

You can also use the Sony Smart Tags accessories, which can be set to trigger different actions (there's a long list of options available). To streamline the process, you can use the Smart Tags widget.

   
Smart Tags widget helps you set actions for NFC tags

And we're not done yet - the Sony droid has a microHDMI port so you can easily play those FullHD videos and show off the 12MP photos on an HDTV. There's a twist too - there's a dedicated TV launcher that is easy to use on a big screen.

We say on the big screen because you don't have to use the phone's touchscreen to control the launcher (you can if you want to). Compatible TVs (we're not sure which TVs are) can talk back to the Sony Xperia S, so you can use the TV's remote to operate the launcher.

The TV Launcher UI

There's plenty of functionality available here - you can browse the photos and videos in the Gallery, use Sony's Video Unlimited and Music Unlimited, browse the web or launch Facebook, check Gmail or use any installed app really (you can just add its shortcut to the list).

And since typing with the remote isn't very handy, you can use voice search.

The Sony Xperia S has a microUSB port with USB On-The-Go support. We tried hooking up various accessories - flash storage worked, but hooking up other phones in Mass Storage mode was problematic (especially if the second phone supports USB OTG too), we even tried a USB keyboard and it worked (but a USB mouse didn't).

One more connectivity feature before we're done - the Xperia S has a built-in A-GPS receiver, which also works with GLONASS. This can give you faster locks and better positional accuracy, especially in dense urban areas.

First impressions

The Sony Xperia S is worlds ahead of the previous Xperia generation and we're genuinely impressed. It's a proper premium droid and would have been absolutely spectacular mere months ago.

The Xperia S hasn't got a quad-core processor (not even a next-gen dual-core) and it only comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread out of the box for now.

But here's what the Xperia S has going for it: the screen is nothing short of amazing, the camera is one of very few to offer 12MP resolution and the connectivity has plenty of useful features. And Sony really managed to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the Snapdragon chipset inside. Last but not least, we do like the new design line too.

The phone looks great and the build quality is worthy of a flagship. If you can get over the lack of two extra cores and ICS at launch (the update is coming), there's plenty to like about the Sony Xperia S.