Sony Ericsson XPERIA Neo review, pictures, Details, model specifications
It’s a sequel. Same cast and the same story but with a new lead and a new director. Shot in HD. The Sony Ericsson XPERIA Neo is to settle some unfinished business at the box office. A year stands between the Vivaz and the Neo and Android does make all the difference.
The XPERIA Neo is part of Sony Ericsson’s new droid lineup and takes advantage of all the new features – the LED-backlit Reality display with Sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine, an 8 megapixel Exmor R camera sensor, 720p video with continuous autofocus and the latest Android – 2.3 Gingerbread.
Key features
- Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
- 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
- 3.7″ 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit LCD touchscreen of FWVGA resolution (480 x 854 pixels) on Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine
- Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread
- 1 GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 chipset
- 512 MB RAM
- 8 MP autofocus camera, LED flash, geotagging
- 720p video @ 30fps, continuous autofocus
- Front facing VGA camera, video calls
- Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
- GPS with A-GPS
- microSD slot (32GB supported, 8GB card included)
- Accelerometer and proximity sensor
- Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
- Stereo FM radio with RDS
- microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
- Voice dialing
- Adobe Flash 10.2 support
- microHDMI port
Main disadvantages
- Display has poor viewing angles
- The competition has dual-core CPUs, 1080p video
- No smart dialing
- Loudspeaker has below average performance
- No DivX/XviD support
- Memory card slot under the battery cover
The Neo benefits from new technology but it does well to focus on the important stuff: imaging. It’s not the 3.7 touchscreen that makes this phone, nor is it the 1 GHz CPU or the latest Android Gingerbread. And hey, these are all fine features to have. But in the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Neo the HD-enabled cameraphone comes before the all-round droid smartphone.
Timescape UI is here to stay
The Timescape brings all your communications together: an aggregate view of your SMS, MMS, email, call log, Facebook and Twitter updates. Timescape has a tabbed structure, allowing you to filter the contents by type and get all relevant information in one place.
A beautiful phonebook
The Xperia Neo’s visually customized phonebook can store extensive information about all your contacts. The list can be sorted by either first or last name.
Telephony still misses smart dialing
The Xperia Neo held on to signal well and we didn’t experience dropped calls. Reception levels are good on both ends of calls, the earpiece is loud enough and there were no interferences whatsoever. The built-in secondary microphone is used for active noise-cancellation so calls are loud and clear even in noisy environments.
Unfortunately, the Xperia Neo does not support smart dialing. There’s voice dialing though (the quickest way to activate it is the dedicated homescreen widget).
Capable messaging
The messaging department of Android values simplicity in design and is very easy to use. All SMS/MMS communication is organized into threads.
Each thread is laid out as an IM chat session, the latest message at the bottom. You can manage individual messages (forward, copy, delete) and even lock them (against deletion). You can use search to find a specific message in all conversations.
The Quick Contacts feature only works in separate messages, not in the whole thread. You can also activate delivery reports.
Text input is fine
As for text input, the Neo offers a just the default (Gingerbread) on-screen full QWERTY keyboard. Even on the portrait keyboard, typing is pretty comfortable, keys are large enough and well spaced.
Gallery downsizes photos
The Xperia Neo uses the traditional droid Gallery, which hasn’t really seen much change in Gingerbread. It has good functionality, cool 3D looks and nice transition effects, but unfortunately only shows a downsized version of your images.
The different albums and folders appear as piles of photos, which fall in neat grids once selected. If you have online albums over at Picasa those show up as separate stacks as well.
Poor video playback
There is no dedicated video player app on the Xperia Neo as in most of the droids out there. Fair enough, maybe a fancy UI for picking a video is not that important, playing videos is what really counts. Well, that’s another disappointment – the video player supports only 3GP and MP4 videos.
To its credit, the Xperia Neo did play a 720p MP4 video though. And the 3.7” FWVGA Reality screen is a pure joy to watch. If you re-encode your videos before hand, the Xperia Neo can make a good video player.
Another beauty – the music player
The music player on the Xperia Neo is quite similar to the music section of the axed Mediascape app. The interface is laid out in four tabs for the available sorting options: all artists, all tracks, playlists and albums.
If you hit the menu key you’ll get send and delete options. There is also a dedicated search bar at the top.
FM radio
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo is also equipped with an FM radio, which has a really neat and simple interface. It automatically scans the area for the available stations and places “notches” on the frequency dial for easier scrolling to the next station. Or you can mark some of them as favorite for easier scrolling.
Pretty good audio quality
In our audio quality test the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Neo did just as good as its Xperia PLAY and Arc siblings. It excelled with great frequency response and low noise levels and excellent dynamic range readings.
The only problems we noticed is the stereo crosstalk, which spikes when you plug in a pair of headphones, and its its overall average loudness. The distortion levels increase too in that scenario, but they still remain tolerable.
With an active external amplifier, on the other hand, you are also getting some pretty low distortions and stereo-crosstalk readings.
Mid-range 8 megapixel snapper
The Xperia Neo boasts an 8 megapixel snapper with a single LED flash. The Neo uses an Exmor R backlit sensor which, in theory, provides better low-light images. In reality the advantage of the backlit technology is marginal at best.
The user interface of the Neo’s camera is quite intuitive. You have a bar with five shortcuts to popular features on the right, a bar with the latest captured images on the left and still camera/camcorder switch at the bottom.
Photo quality comparison
We’ve also added the Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo to the database of our Photo Compare Tool. The Tool’s page has a quick how to guide and also what to look for.
You can clearly see from the comparison tool that the Arc’s doaing much better than the Neo in shooting stills although they should have identical sensors. The Arc exhibits less noise and produces more natural looking images in terms of sharpness.
HD video recording
HD video recording is turning as a hot feature recently and the Xperia Neo is doing relatively well with the framerate. It’s 30fps and quite steady too. There were a few duplicated frames, but not that much to ruin the video.
The Neo’s camcorder joins the select few with continuous autofocus. Its approach is the same as on the Xperia X10 and the Arc: it may take a few seconds to refocus after you reframe instead of fast and constant re-focusing. It’s certainly the approach we prefer.
The videos run smooth, but have the same problems as the still images. This time they are virtually identical to those by the Xperia Arc. The resolved detail is good, the noise levels are kept low, but the staircase effect is visible on too much places as it was on the Arc.
Video quality comparison
We added the Xperia Neo samples to our Video Compare Tool database too and put it head to head with the other 720p mobile camcorders we have tested.
Here you can see the staircase effects on both Arc and Neo and compare it to other (better) HD camcorders. Surprisingly the Neo managed to resolve more detail in our comparison video, than the Arc.
Connectivity
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo has the full set of connectivity options: quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and tri-band HSPA with download rates of up to 7.2 Mbps and upload at 5.76 Mbps.
It offers Wi-Fi (b/g/n), USB v2.0 and Bluetooth 2.1.
The inbuilt storage is 320MB only, but you can expand it up to 32GB via the microSD card slot. The phone will ship with an 8GB memory card.
Unlike the Nexus S though, there is no NFC support.
A standard 3.5mm audio jack and the mini-HDMI port complete the connectivity tally. Unfortunately you’ll have to buy your own HDMI cable, it’s not included in the retail box.
Web browser speaks Flash
With added Flash 10.1 support and the latest and fastest UI version, 2.3.2 Gingerbread, the Neo’s web browser does a great job.
The user interface chrome is pretty light at first sight. Once the page loads, all you see is the URL bar and the bookmark button on a line at the top of the screen. Once you zoom in and pan around though even that line disappears (scroll to the top or press menu to bring it back).
The organizer is full suite
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo comes with a solid set of organizing options, including a document viewer.
The app in question is OfficeSuite and it has support for viewing document files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF, including the Office 2007 versions). For editing, you will need to get the paid app.
Google Maps, GPS and limited navigation
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo comes with a GPS receiver, which locked onto satellites in about 2-3 minutes with A-GPS turned off.
Google Maps is the main application and its Street View mode is probably the best part of the deal in places where turn-by-turn voice navigation isn’t yet offered. If the Street View is available in the area you’re interested in, you can enjoy a 360-degree view of the area. Zoom is supported through pinch and double tap gestures. When the digital compass is turned on it feels like making a virtual tour of the surroundings!
