Detailed Review

Design:

Xperia Tipo is Sony’s low cost Xperia series smartphone, but a good one. The handset dimension’s 103 mm, 57 mm and 13 mm in height, width and depth. Tipo is a light weight phone with just 99.4 gm. The phone comes with 3.2 inches scratch-resistant TFT touch screen with 320 x 480 pixels screen resolution. It is available four attractive colours - Black, Red, Blue and white. The design of the device is good and is easy to carry. On the top it has a 3.5 mm earjack. The right side has a USB charger/PC connecting port whereas, the left side of the phone gives you volume/camera key on the upper side. It lacks with front facing camera. Below the screen is a physical home key with back and menu key along its sides. On the back of the device you have a 3.2 megapixels camera but lacks with LED flash light. And below the camera is a speaker grill. Overall, the phone is handy with a different and attractive look that will attract the youth, but it fall short with its small screen size.

                         

Interface/OS:

The Sony Xperia Tipo runs on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. This phone is power backed by 800 MHz Qualcomm processor and 512 MB of RAM. When tested, the mobile functioned smoother and easier but, sometimes delays in multitasking and swapping applications because of its weak processing.

                                                      

Camera:

The Xperia Tipo comes with an average 3.2 megapixels camera with auto focus, but lacks with LED flash light. It does not carry a front facing camera for video calls. The camera has all smart features like, Geo-tagging, image stabilization, smile and face detection and touch focus. It has in-built photo light, 3D sweep panorama and auto focus functions enabled with 4X digital zoom. The image playback supported formats are BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WBMP and the image captured supported format is JPEG. When tested, the outdoor images were clear and rich with colours whereas, the indoor shots were clear with flash support but the colours were dull. The camera captures the picture fast and the overall camera performance is average.

Memory:

Sony Xperia Tipo in-built holds 2.9 GB memory space, from which 2.2 GB is user accessible memory with 512 MB of RAM. It allows you to extend it up to 32 GB through micro SD extension slot.

Battery:

Xperia Tipo comes with a standard Li-Ion 1200 mAh battery which, to an extend has done justice to this device. It delivers the stand by time of up to 400 hours on 2G and up to 350 hours on 3G. The music playback time for this music centric phone is up to 17 hours and the Talk Time from the battery is up to 13 hours on 2G and up to 6.5 hours when on 3G. The overall battery performance when tested was great with average daily use but it discharges early with more browsing and 3G use.

Audio/Video:

Xperia Tipo is amazing and so its music player, but it's not exclusive to this particular phone infact it is available on other Xperia models as well. This phone has a FM radio with RDS player and it supports MP3, 3GPP, MP4, SMF, WAV, OTA and Ogg vorbis audio playback supported formats. Track ID music recognition is in-built in the device and 3GPP, MP4 and AMR are audio recording supported formats. It comes with xLOUD Experience, the audio filter technology from Sony. The video quality of the phone when tested was good and the colours were sharp and rich of outdoor shoot. The video playback and recording formats are 3GPP and MP4.

Features:

Xperia Tipo from Sony is in-built with all basic Android smart phone features and applications and you can purchase or download latest android applications to your phone. In-built it has many social and other apps integrated like, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, etc. The list of pre-loaded application include: Google Voice Search, Google Talk video chat, Google Mail, Google Calendar, and Google Maps with Street View. For connectivity and communication you have multiple options like USB High speed 2.0 and Micro USB support with Native USB tethering. As well as WiFi and WiFi Hotspot functionality with DLNA Certified you can connect/access to internet. Synchronization via Exchange ActiveSync, Google Sync and Facebook is possible. aGPS is in-built in the device and you have a WebKit web browser with Pan and zoom functions in it. Bluetooth technology helps you pair with other devices and share data with them.

Conclusion:

The Sony Xperia Tipo is truly a compact smart phone in Sony’s Xperia series. It has its own fixed target audience but this phone is much better than others in this price range. Its 800 MHz processor, 3.2 megapixels camera and Android 4.0 version are its main key features that gives it edge over its competitors. But it trails with less 512 MB RAM, small screen size and no front camera. This might be a reason to think. So, we give this phone 3.5 star rating.

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