Hands on with the Sony Xperia S, P and U

Reg Hardware Mobile Week Sony's Xperia S flagship smartphone was on show at the company's MWC 2012 event in London yesterday and, having had a play with it this NFC-equipped Android, I'm impressed. Prototype models of others in the new Xperia NXT range, the U and P, were also on show. Sony Xperia S The build itself is …

[Mark #255]

shiny... but

Well, they look nice, and that nfc trick is pretty neat, but...

Sony are *that* company, which thought that rootkits were okay.

So, sorry; it's nice, but I haven't forgiven you yet. Try next Feb 29th?

[Tom Clark]

Battery?

I've pre-ordered my S, but beginning to get worried that not one of the reviews / hands-on I've seen has mentioned real-time battery life. It's all well and good having a phone which can sing and dance and knit a jumper while making the tea, but it's just a doorstop if it won't stay on for more than 10mins.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Battery?

...and yet you pre-ordered it anyway?

I thought it was only Apple fanbois who were meant to be sheep

[cortezcortez]

Re: Re: Battery?

Didn't the worrying come after the pre-ordering? How does that make him/her a sheep?

[cortezcortez]

It's so pretty!

I've never been a fan of Sony phones, so why are these three calling out to me in sultry, honeyed tones? I'm no fan of gimmicks either (hello NFC tags) but that colour-changing illuminated strip is frickin' cool - every time I'm reminded of the lack of an expansion slot and removable battery I keep thinking of that warm glow......

[N13L5]

Sony is taking too much of the Apple route, without expandable memory, or swappable battery.

The CPU is also last year's chip.. at least the top of the line should have something equivalent to a Tegra 3.

That camera had better be really unbelievably good, cause I see no other possible reason to buy this over a Galaxy SIII or even last year's Galaxy SII.

I refuse to buy an iPhone, because of the battery issue, with my batteries always giving out after one year, and I also like to carry spares when I travel. A spare battery is such a cheap way to make your phone that much more useful.

I agree with other posters who said they hadn't forgiven Sony for its conniving treatment of customers - which isn't limited to that rootkit scandal either, but I still dislike Apple more than Sony :P

[Santonia]

Storage

It's a sad day indeed when even the Reg is jumping on the 'heck, why would you even need more storage' bandwagon.

I seem to remember, not too long ago, that the worlds biggest selling music player was available in sizes up to 160gb. There seemed to be some kind of acceptance that more storage was better (so one could carry around all the music/video/etc you want). Slowly that music functionality has become integrated into a phone. All good, 2 devices become one.

For the iOS crowd Apple will happily fine you £700 for a 64gb iPhone. Not cheap but is a decent amount of non-expandable storage. In the recent past of Android world you could comfort yourself with internal storage + MicroSD. This was a standard feature. Now it seems with Android ICS they (Google) are not so keen on card storage. Apparently we can store all our music in the 'cloud'. Yeah right. Unlike the mobile phone development community, I live in the real world. The one where a 3G signal is about as consistent as very inconsistent thing on a changeable day. And I live in the populous SE of England. Not allowing removable storage is a mistake, the infrastucture is not there yet for it to be replaced by a remote server.

Please Samsung, continue to fly the flag for MicroSD...and please, everyone else, stop this irritating practise.