Today I’ll be telling you a think or two about the Sony Xperia L, a mid-range phone for a very accessible price. This is one of those phones known with two names – the C2105 and C2104. Both of them are similar in almost every way, aside from a few networking differences ( you let the provider you got it from do the thinking, you won’t even have to worry about it ).
I’ll be frank with you here: personally, I’m not a huge fan of Xperia phones – mainly because I don’t quite fancy their design. I dislike the fact that they tend to add some ( in my opinion ) unnecessary margins around the screen, thus making the phone somewhat larger than it really needs to be. However, while my opinions on Xperia phones are indeed mixed, I try to steer clear of too much subjectivity in these small reviews that I occasionally post.
SUMMARY
Leaving any personal judgments that I may have for the phone aside, the Sony Xperia L is a really good device. It has some great mid-range stuff for a very good price. The exact price I can’t really tell you, because you know how each store adds something to it in order to cut a profit. However, I can tell you a small interval: I do seem to keep finding this phone between the prices of 250 and 300 dollars. That, in my opinion, is a great price for such a device. You see I like to look at things as the following: I want to get the same amount of power ( ideally more ) for the amount I pay. This phone does just that, sometimes even going into the ideal mode of giving you more than you paid for. It’s not to say that it doesn’t have drawbacks, but with all things considered, they are generally canceled out by the advantages of the Sony Xperia L.
GENERAL
Aside from some minor differences in numbers, the Sony Xperia L use the standard GSM networks for both 2G and 3G. Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t have 4G support, but not so many countries have that so it’s not really such a problem. The phone is available and has been available for quite some time – ever since May, actually.
BODY
The Sony Xperia L is a pretty small phone ( used to a be a pretty average-sized phone, but with so many larger phones flooding the market, the average has increased – math-wise anyways ) with a 4.3 inch wide screen. The specifics about size for this phone are: 128.7 x 65 x 9.7 mm ( or 5.07 x 2.56 x 0.38 in ) and it weighs circa 137 g ( or approximately 4.83 oz ). See, as I said, a pretty small or relatively average phone.
DISPLAY
The Sony Xperia L has a pretty standard display, but it does have a few things that set it apart from most. The quality of the screen isn’t outstanding, but it’s good nonetheless: TFT type screen, 16 million colors, 480 x 854 pixels resolution and a pixel density of circa 228 pixels per inch. The display of this phone also has a pretty special Multitouch method, allowing for up to 4 simultaneous fingers to register movement. The type of screen protection on this phone is a coating of Scratch-Resistant Glass ( meaning it can probably handle a fall or two or even the occasional run-in with keys in the same pocket, but I wouldn’t necessarily force my hand with this.
SOUND
There’s really not much to say about the audio quality of the Sony Xperia L, considering it isn’t really enhancement by any means at all, be them hardware-based or software-based. Again, it’s not that I’m implying the quality is bad, it’s just that from personal use I’ve found that those with even the smallest piece of audio enhancement tend to be WAY superior to those lacking any whatsoever.
MEMORY
The Sony Xperia L is a fairly good phone as far as memory is concerned – nothing too phenomenal, but more than enough to get the job done. The internal storage space is of 8 GB, but only 5.8 of those are user-available. The RAM of the device is 1 GB – here some people will argue that the phone has way too less, but I believe that it has just about enough to complete most tasks a phone should complete, and on top of that run the occasional app and game as well. For those of you who absolutely MUST have more storage space, the phone also has a card slot which takes any Micro SD card of up to 32 GB.
DATA CONNECTION
The connectivity of the Sony Xperia L is pretty okay. The phone comes equipped with GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth v4.0 with A2DP, NFC and a decent internet speed to boot. The Wi-Fi of the phone is also something not to be ignored – 802.11 a/b/g/n with Dual-Band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and Wi-Fi Hotspot. This phone also has a Micro-USB v2.0 port on it, but it has no built-in support for MHL or SlimPort, so you’ll have to make do without.
CAMERA
The cameras of this phone are quite something, but even they are not without certain drawbacks. The secondary frontal camera is not much to look at, being in mere VGA quality, but the main camera of 8 MP sure can leave an impression. The main camera, for some reason, can only record video in 720p quality at 30 frames per second. The many features of this main camera include: autofocus, LED flash, geo-tagging, face and smile detection, image stabilization, sweep panorama, video stabilization and HDR ( for both pictures and videos ) as well.
BATTERY LIFE
The battery of the Sony Xperia L is a pretty powerful one. This phone has a standard Li-Po 1750 mAh battery that can ensure quite some time of usage for the phone. Allegedly, those promised times are: 498 and 454 hours of stand-by in 2G and 3G respectively, 9 hours and 8 hours and 30 minutes of talk-time in 2G and 3G respectively, and a whopping 43 hours and 12 minutes of continuous music play ( this I’ve got to see for myself to believe, but let’s leave it at that ).
HARDWARE
Without beating around the bush, I can tell you that the hardware found on the Sony Xperia L is good ( not great, but slightly above average – and with the average being so high right now, that’s saying something ). The phone has a Qualcomm MSM8230 Snapdragon chipset which sustains a Dual-Core 1 GHz processor and an Adreno 305 GPU. These components, taken separately, don’t provide you with too much power, but together they offer the potential of running just about any app out there.
SOFTWARE
The Android OS found on this device upon purchase is v4.1 Jelly Bean, yet the phone is upgrade-able to 4.2.2 Jelly Bean ( officially ). Unofficially, you can probably get any version of Android running on it, but it’s not wise or recommended to do that ( yet that didn’t stop me from doing it with my phones just for the heck of it, so I guess I’m not in the situation to preach about not getting unofficial versions ).
FEATURES
This phone doesn’t have an outstanding number of features, but it still supports a decent number. The phone has accelerometer, proximity and compass sensors, it also has HTML5 for the browser, it has Stereo FM radio with RDS and Java through MIDP emulation. Messaging on this device can be done via SMS ( with Threaded View ), MMS, E-Mail, Push Mail and IM and the GPS of the device also has support for A-GPS. The Sony Xperia L is available in 3 colors: Black, White and Red.
Below I’ll provide you with a small list of what this phone can do:
- SNS integration
- Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
- MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV player
- MP3/eAAC+/WMA/WAV player
- Document viewer
- Photo viewer/editor
- Voice memo/dial
- Predictive text input
This concludes our little review of the Sony Xperia L. I tried touching most important parts here and talking about everything as briefly as I could, without going into too many technical or boring details. I do hope it has proven somewhat enlightening to you all and that at the very least it offered you a bit of extra info about the device.
