SE-NSE Forums:

Design

The Xperia Neo conforms to the current standard for smartphone design i.e. a big central touchscreen around which the rest of the handset is built. Whilst there is nothing new to the design that stands out, the dark blue colour of the handset might appeal to those looking for a device that doesn’t come in the whites, greens, reds, or whatever else of some other handsets.

The first thing that struck me when picking the Neo up for the first time is that it’s comfortable to hold. Now that may seem like a minor point, but when using smartphones it’s never a bad thing for the device to fit well in the hand and be a pleasure to use in that respect.

Unfortunately the materials used for the Neo feel decidedly cheap to the touch so this nice feeling of the handset in your hand is mitigated somewhat. It’s not a major flaw, but it’s certainly not something that leaves a good first impression.

All the usual hardware features are present. The right hand side of the handset features both the volume rocker and the camera button, whilst the top of the device sports the HDMI port and the mini-USB port. The speaker is locate don the back of the handset and is in a bit of an awkward position there, but more on that later. In terms of the screen it’s a 3.7 inch affair so not the biggest on the market, but adequate enough for this mid-range offering.

Interface

The handset is running Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which is great to see on Sony Ericsson handsets after the Xperia X10 fiasco. It’s also nice to see even mid-range handsets running the latest versions of the platform. Beyond that though is the practicality of the platform, it generally provided for a pretty smooth and fluid experience.

I was, on the whole, pleased with how the interface responded. There was no noticeable lag when transitioning between different screens or working with the UI. Of course there were the usual Android customisation options available e.g. widgets, etc. So definitely a nice experience on this front.

If you have used an Android handset before then the interface will be familiar to you. There are no major surprises or deviations from the norm here. Calling up the app menu shows you the apps in the standard grid format and you can re-arrange the placement of your apps as you see fit by using the little square icon button that you can see in the lower hand corner of the screenshot below. You will also notice a little arrow icon button that screenshot. That allows you to sort your apps alphabetically, most often used or most recently installed for the more fastidious amongst you.

The Homescreen is as you would expect it. The standard Gingerbread configuration of having a four button dock with various shortcuts is present and you can alter these to your preference.

The default setup fo the Neo has Sony Ericsson’s Timescape widget on the Homescreen, but again you can move, replace or delete this as you see fit.

Calling & Messaging

Call quality was good, there were no dropped calls in the tests I carried out nor did the handset struggle to hold onto a signal. There isn’t really much to say here given that everything was fine in this department. It was neither stand out brilliant nor apalling bad, but pretty much par for the course and perfectly acceptable.

Whilst we’re on the subject of calls it’s worth talking a little about contacts. Again for Android users this will be nothing new. There are options to sync your contacts list with various social media options such as Twitter, Facebook and of course Google. Doing so will see your contacts list fill up with the various people you know from those services. Each contact card contains a plethora of information; from their phone number to email address and status updates from social media.

Text messaging was a breeze. It’s a staple of mobile phones so it was nice to see that it remained simple and straightforward.

I was generally pleased with the onscreen keyboard, it was responsive and the keys were well palced so that you could bash out a message quickly without too many mistakes. However, there was one tiny flaw that I found incredibly annoying. It’s something that other reviewers have also picked up on and I can see why.

The keyboard is setup so that the apostrophe key is located on the symbols page of the keyboard rather than the main page with the letters. For a symbol that is used to often in writing you would think it would be right there at the front ready to use. Now this may seem a small thing, but switching back and forth between the different set of characters on the keyboard just to get an apostrophe soon became a bit taxing and really quite irritating.

One other annoyance was in the presentation of messages. Messages sent and received from a particular person are displayed like a conversation. It’s standard fare these days for most smartphones. That’s all well and good. However, both the sent and received messages are shown in the same colour so it can be a little confusing at times as to whether you are reading the messages you have sent or received from that person.

Just a quick note about email. GMail is pre-loaded on the handset as you would expect and as always does a bang up job of handling your GMail account. GMail is one of the best apps for Android, it does what it says on the tin and really gives you very few problems.

The generic email app present on the Neo, however, is true to form with these sort of default email apps and is something you will probably ignore. It’s not awful or anything, but it just doesn’t feel particularly nice to use nor does it have all the little extras you might expect from a more well rounded and polished app.

Connectivity

There is quite the range of options for connectivity here, especially given that this is a mid-range handset. You have HSDPA of course (rated for 7.2 Mbps), HSUPA (5.76 Mbps), Bluetooth, and WiFi b/g/n. There is also support for DLNA and like other Gingerbread handsets the Neo can turn itself into a WiFi hotspot.

The handset comes with a stock browser for accessing the web. You can of course replace this with a browser from the Android Market, but for the purposes of testing I stuck with the default option.

It’s a decent enough browser, certainly it’s up to the task of general web browsing. Pages loaded pretty quickly, even those with a lot of images or other content. I tried various sites and it breezed through them all. It’s also worth mentioning that since the handset supports Flash you can watch such videos within the browser itself rather than having to launch a third party app.

Now whilst the browser loaded pages quickly I did find that navigating around them could be a little choppy on occassion. It was nothing major, but from time to time panning around a page or zooming into a particular area of it and out again produced a little bit of lag. Let me stress here that this really wasn’t a major issue and shouldn’t impact your usage very much, but nevertheless it is worth mentioning.

There are the usual sharing options present e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc in case you decide you want to share a website with your mates.

Camera

Sony Ericsson has traditionally shipped pretty good cameraphones so I was keen to see whether the Neo lived up to the reputation. I am happy to report that I wasn’t disappointed.
The camera module itself is an 8.1 MP effort and yes it is one of those Exmor R jobs that Sony Ericsson has been flashing around in their recent handsets.

The camera is accessed through the dedicated camera hardware button located at the bottom right hand side of the handset. I found I had to give it a good old press for it to register, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At least the camera shouldn’t be activating accidentally. The hardware button is also used to actually take pictures, but there is also the option to simply touch the screen too.

The interface here is nice and clean with the different camera options neatly presented in a menu on the right of the screen. There aren’t actually all that many options, it’s pretty much the basics, but again that’s not a bad thing. Most people are probably not interested in tinkering with lots of options on a cameraphone and what is presented is just enough in my opinion.

You can change the resolution of the camera from the headlin 8.1 MP all the way down to 2 MP. Incidentally the 2 MP mode is the only one that gives the option of zooming. That is a little annoying I have to say and maybe something for Sony Ericsson to think about.

I’ve included a couple of shots for you to take a look at below:

Whilst we’re on the subject of the camera let me quickly touch upon the handset’s video capabilities. Again there are various options to select e.g. scenes, exposure, etc. Nothing too in-depth, but enough to keep you busy I suppose.

It’s not a bad effort in terms of video quality as you can see below. Are there other handsets with better video recording? Sure. Will the Neo suffice for most people’s needs? Sure. It might not be the absolute best in this department, but it really is perfectly good for what most users would want to do so no real issues here.

Media

For a mid-range handset the Neo is no slough on the multimedia front. The screen is a decent effort, bright, responsive and easy to view although at 3.7 inches it isn’t the biggest on the market. There is a HDMI port present so you can hook the handset up to a larger screen for viewing content.

The Neo comes with a pre-loaded music player, which is actually pretty decent. It might not have all the features of some of the dedicated music apps in the Android Market, but it is functional and easy to use. You can also pop a widget for this app on the Homescreen if you need quick access to it.

In terms of the sound quality it was something of a mixed bag. On the one hand the handset produces a loud, easy to hear sound. However, that is somewhat mitigated by the placement of the speaker on the back of the handset. I found that it wasn’t too hard to cover the speaker whilst holding the handset, which obviously muffled the sound.

There is also an inbuilt FM radio, which is as good as FM radios on any other mobile phone. That is to say not very. FM radios in mobiles have never particularly impressed me for various reasons. For one thing they tend to have very little functionality beyond picking a station and listening and secondly you are required to use the headphones, which act as an antenna. In all honesty you are probably better off downloading an internet radio app from the Android Market.

Video playback was of a decent quality. Note I use the word ‘decent’ here. It was watchable, but I couldn’t help feeling that it lacked a certain crispness. Certainly when compared with its high-end cousin the Xperia arc (which I watched a full film on) it felt a little lacklustre. This isn’t a major complaint I should point out, but if you have been used to a higher end handset like the Xperia arc then this may seem like a step down in this regard.

Both video playback and images are handled by the same app. Here things proved better in terms of viewing though. Pictures, especially those taken with the in-built camera, looked fresh and presented themselves very nicely indeed.

There aren’t a whole lot of options with images though, it basically comes down to viewing them or sharing them through social media.

Battery

There was nothing that stood out here, either in terms of the battery being poor or good. It seemed pretty average really. I found that I could get through a full day with what might be called ‘average usage’. I made a few calls; did a bit of web browsing; took a few pictures, etc. I did, however, have to give it a charge every night. When I ramped things up a bit to a heavier usage pattern the battery definitely took a hit. It did still last me through the day, but I was charging it when I got home at the end of the day rather than last thing at night.

All in the battery lasted approximately 12 hours or so with average usage and probably two thirds of that with heavier usage.

Applications and Services

All the usual suspects are here e.g. Facebook, various game demos, Google Maps, etc. There really wasn’t anything that stood out as being worth mentioning except for Timescape.

Timescape is Sony Ericsson’s own creation, an app that shows you a timeline of recent events on your handset, from calls to texts to social media updates. It presentes this information in the form of a scrollable card wheel displayed on the Homescreen through a widget.

In terms of presentation it certainly looks nice and it i actually quite useful if you need to quickly see what’s been going on recently. imescape was first tried out on the Xperia X10 and back then one of my chief criticisms of it was the annoying lag as the app updated with ne winformation or when you scrolled through it. This does seem to have got better on the Neo, but there was still noticeable lag when scrolling.

Conclusion

It’s a good handset. That’s a veryy simple statement to make, but I think it encapsulated the overall impression I came away with. There was nothing particularly impressive about it, but neither was there anything that was particularly bad.

The responsiveness of the Neo was generally very good.There was the odd little bit of lag here and there, but for the most part it responded well and was a geneuine pleasure to use. The camera is another high point. I was pretty impressed by the picture quality and whilst it might not have as wide a range of camera options as some other handsets it works with what it has and it works well.

There are some annoying design flaws present. For example, the placement of the speaker at the back of the handset makes it easy to muffle the sound. The camera button seemed a bit too unresponsive. The materials used to construct the handset felt a little cheap and didn’t really give an impression of the quality underneath.

The only thing that really annoyed me with the Neo was the placement of the apostrophe symbol when typing. It was frankly a pain to switch keyboard screens each time.

If someone asked me if they should buy this phone I would definitely say yes. That’s about as high a compliment as any one can give it. It has its flaws to be sure, but none of them were so glaring that they would make this a poor choice.

Pros

Good quality camera
Gingerbread 2.3
Responsiveness

Cons

Some hardware design flaws
Annoying keyboard usage at time
Cheap feel