It’s a day of reviews here at AiC for me.  I was on a roll last night.

Specs

4.3″ screen (1280×720)

1.5GHz Dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon

1GB Ram

32GB storage

Android 2.3.7 [ICS coming soon] with TimeScape UI

NFC

Impressions

What can I say about this phone.  Sony’s been the sleeper horse in this race for excellent phones.  We haven’t heard all that much about them since they dropped the Ericsson line, but that hasn’t meant they rested on their laurels.  In face Jean-Baptiste Queru himself (of the Android department) once gave them props for being a manufacturer who’s keeping up with the Android ecosystem.  He was talking specifically about their faster than average turn around for updates to the firmware (ironic he wrote it about the Tablet S update, which we still haven’t seen in Canada yet).

When you first pick up the phone you’ll notice the heft of it.  It’s a little heavier than some other phones (it’s 144g vs. the Nexus at 127g), but it has that very ‘sturdy’ feel to it.  Aside to the sturdy feel you have an excellent display.

[Note about the screen, I mentioned in the video that I already have a scratch on the screen.  It looks like there is a film on the screen… aside from that, they are pretty micro micro abrasions… but I can see them]

you can see the thin film that starts at the corner of the glass

What you’ll first notice is that lit up strip near the bottom.  Very cool, but don’t get fooled, the actual buttons are just above them (I make this mistake constantly).

The back has the speaker, and it’s pretty loud.  Definitely louder than my Nexus, but I find it a little bass heavy comparatively.  Then again, if you want quality sound you’re going to use the headphones.

Using the phone you’ll note it’s still on Gingerbread, as such it doesn’t have that ‘sleek’ feel like ICS does, however TimeScape really gives it a snappy feel (thanks to a dual core 1.5 and 1GB of RAM) that’s very fluid and animated.  Plenty of attractive widgets for you to play with.

Also, it has a very integrated Facebook / Twitter social scene with their TimeScape flow widgets to give you an interesting look at a combined instream of posts and videos etc…

The keyboard it provides you with is less than ideal, but has the now standard ‘swipe’ option.

The other modification they provide is a very decent email app.  It gives you a preview of the email … a sort of peek … which is neat, but I don’t like it being on top.  Again, just a way for them to make everything look appealing, but end up being a little cliché.  It is something to show off and impress your friends with tho’.

Camera

Speaking of cliché, they have a camera built into this thing.  Normally I mean ‘camera phone’, but in this case it’s a very nice camera.  It has it’s own shutter button, complete with the ‘half press to focus / full press to snap’ option.  I found the focus to be less than ideal however.

Where the ‘cliche’ comes in, is they have 3D options for you.  Not with 2 camera lenses like some models, but accomplish it in a ‘sweeping / variable angle’ method.

I tried this out in a few instances, and … well, without a 3D display device, I don’t see the appeal.  With the variable angle option you can tilt the phone to see the ‘perspective change’ of the subject, but again, it’s not much more than a novel thing.

Other thoughts

It comes with NFC built in, which I believe is going to be THE thing for phones soon. I didn’t get any tags to play with it to test out the automation, but it’s extremely enticing for me to go and pick a set of Sony’s tags up ($30 should get you about 4 tags), and then there’s the Sony app you can use to set up the automation.

The major downside to this device is that Rogers heavily bloats the phone with their own software.  Sure, Sony has several of its own, but they’re pretty useful.  Rogers, on the other hand, has about 9 built into the phone.  So in order to get rid of them, you’d have to root the phone, but if you do that you may not get the official builds for ICS, and switching ROMs may get you to miss out on the goodies that Sony put in.

Last bit, port covers.  Hate ‘em.  I want to rip them out, but I also hate always open ones.  What I wouldn’t give to go back to the style like the Captivate had with the slide.  That was nice!

Video

Screen Shots

CONCLUSION

This is a really, really nice phone.  It has that great ‘in the pocket’ feel, both literally and in terms of how well it performs (for those of you in the piping realm, you know what I mean).  It’s on the Rogers network for only $100, so you can’t argue the price on it.

I would really recommend this for the user who has had a fairly old phone, or a BlackBerry etc… who wants to jump to Android, without going ‘all-in’ on a Nexus device.