Sony Xperia S

Five star review?

For: it comes in a nice white box with a picture on it of a phone.

Against: the box has a thing in it masquerading as a phone.

The best way to appreciate the Sony Xperia S is to spend some time on the Sony user forum website. There you can find the long and exhaustive list of issues with the phone.

Camera

The 12MP camera performs woefully and once the sun goes down the output is worse. ICS has helped make it worse again.

Screen

A great deal of Xperia S phones suffer from a yellow tinge on the screen. Nice, if you like yellow, I guess.

Sound

Sound output is a constant issue, both from the phone when held to the ear, from the hands free "loud speaker in call button", and from the headset.

The walkman function requires a third party app to make the sound loud enough to hear musical nuances.

Connectivity

The Sony Bridge for Mac app is hopless and takes numerous goes to get it to check for updates. When it does there are none. The complaints may be too long for tech to deal with. Perhaps the list grows faster than the solution, thus no solution?

Bluetooth is flakey, especially in cars, which is actually where I need it. ICS has partly improved the reliability (I dont have to reboot after every call like I did prior to ICS - slight issue for keeping the battery charge), but ICS still wont allow contacts to transfer to car hard drive in either car I use. Least bluetooth works now, mostly, so I shouldn't complain.

Wifi tethering ceased functioning with ICS. Sometimes USB tethering creates a connection, but more often than not it doesn't. Prior to ICS bluetooth network tethered access didn't work. Under ICS is does, albeit slow. Bluetooth isn't a fast data protocol for the net, on the positive side I wont chew through the data allowance every month. But then again when you need to use the phone as a modem, bluetooth is better than nothing.

Wifi signal strength has dropped significantly since ICS. The wifi fan symbol never fully lights up, even when inches from the router.

Concluding remarks

I could go on, indeed I could have put this on the Sony web forum. There's no point however, apparently Sony are cutting about 1000 or more jobs at Ericsson, so I wont hold my breath for a solution, the tech guys are probably filling out resumes and looking for new jobs. Why not I suppose.

At least in September I wont have to put up with the phone anymore. The xperia S will be written off, I need it for work and to work reliably too. A new iPhone will take its place. I'm no fan boy of anything, but at least my old iphone 4 worked reliably, till I gave it to  a friend, where it now works reliably.

I however can reliably say you can rely on Sony for one thing, to face shrinking profits and a dimished market share if its product reliability doesn't improve.

Five stars? Errm, no.

This phone is a disappointment  ta ta

I have seen the start up boot time and 2d and 3d procesing abilitry,it is not as powerful as the Sammy G3 or the Htc S or One. It is slow with image compression.

The 4.3 inch screen is not big enough, the high pixel and sub pixel count does not convey the image quality, it is still an lcd and not super amoled, contrast is no way as wide and blacks aren't inky deep.

Sony is working on a complete redesign...metal casing, 4.6 screen with quad dcore spotted in south east asia.....aviod the Experia series for now. 

..........'bravia lcd' is still lcd.....like a pig with lip stick is still a pig.......

I maybe tempted on my next smart phone purchase, there are some nice touches to this phone