Sony Xperia V (Bond's Wetsuit): Mobile Review

It won't be long before those full-HD five-inchers start stealing the show and the older Xperia generation should be preparing for life in their shadow. It doesn't mean though that the Xperia V cannot hope for a good time.

We don't see why a phone with dual-core Krait and an LTE connectivity shouldn't enjoy life in the midrange. OK, the upper midrange - but the Xperia V isn't easily caught off guard. Of course, people are not as easily impressed today as, say, a year ago. Yet, a select few phones are willing to offer 1080p videos and 13MP stills, while putting an HD touchscreen at your fingertips.

And there's more to the Xperia V than that. It's more durable than your average smartphone without looking like an army bot. You should've figured it by now, what we have here is a dust and water-resistant Xperia T with 4G connectivity and a tad smaller screen. Oh, well they needed to make sure the wetsuit would still fit the user.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
• 3G with 42.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
• LTE Cat3 DL 100 Mbps UL 50 Mbps
• 4.3" 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit Reality LCD touchscreen of 720p resolution (720 x 1280 pixels) with Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine 2; Scratch-resistant glass
• Android OS v4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean coming up
• IP57 certified for dust and water resistance, up to 1 meter immersion for 30 minutes
• Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait CPU, 1 GB RAM, Adreno 225 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 chipset
• 13 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging, Superior Auto mode
• 1080p video recording @ 30fps with continuous autofocus and stereo sound
• VGA front-facing camera
• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n with DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and hotspot
• GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS
• 8GB of built-in storage, microSD card slot
• microUSB port with MHL and USB-host support
• Stereo Bluetooth v4.0
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• Voice dialing
• Deep Facebook integration
• PlayStation Certified, access to the PS Store
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• NFC connectivity

Main disadvantages

• No JellyBean at launch
• Relatively modest battery capacity
• Video recording fails to impress
• No hardware shutter key
• Comes across as overpriced

Source:
GSMArena

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Jelly Bean ROM (Alpha version) for Xperia T now available

Sony previously had a plan to upgrade certain Xperia™ devices to Jelly Bean. Since then Sony received quite a few requests from the Android™ developer community to release an earlier version of the Jelly Bean (JB) software for the developers. This will enable the advanced developers to try it out and evaluate it. There are some limitations in this alpha software (disclosed by Sony) such as the UI look and feel is not updated to final Sony Jelly Bean software.

Sony is now making an early alpha ROM of Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) available for Xperia^TM T, along with the open source archive. Sony is planning for official release of JB for Xperia^TM T. The released JB alpha ROM is strictly targeting advanced developers, and it will not work for ordinary everyday usage, as it only has a limited set of features working (for example, you cannot make any phone calls).  There are more legal and usage conditions. Please read the Importantinformation for details.

Source:

Sony Mobile

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Sony

• Sony Xperia T
• Sony Xperia V

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