Although it's technically a mid-range phone, the Sony Xperia SP gives the high-end Android handsets a run for the money. For starters, it looks absolutely stunning.
Some might see its plastic back as a step down from rear glass panel used on the high-end Sony Xperia Z, but its smooth contours make it much more comfortable to hold, its aluminium frame looks and feels great. It gives the phone a much more pleasing sense of weight and durability - we're big fans.
The clear, illuminated antenna at the bottom of the phone also helps give it a bit of character to distinguish it from other mid-range handsets. This can flash different colours to indicate when you’ve got a missed call or incoming text, and each option is fully customisable. It can also add a little more flavour to your media by flashing to the beat of your music or matching the dominant colour of your photos. You can turn all this off if you’d prefer, but we didn’t find it particularly distracting.
The Xperia SP's hardware performance is right up there with the very best smartphones currently available. It only has a dual-core Snapdragon processor and 1GB of RAM, but its high clock speed of 1.7GHz made a huge difference in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks. Using Chrome, it completed the test in 1,063ms, and it was even quicker using the Dolphin browser, scoring a super fast 954ms. This is very impressive for a dual-core chip, beating many quad-core phones in this browser test.
Its 3D performance was similarly outstanding. It produced a silky smooth average of 54fps in 3DMark’s Ice Storm test, scoring 10,074 overall. This is just behind the much vaunted Samsung Galaxy S4, but in practical terms you shouldn’t notice any difference. It just about coped with the even more demanding Ice Storm Extreme test as well, scoring 5,689 (or 22fps) overall.
Most tasks won’t need to utilise this extra power, but it made everyday tasks feel that much snappier. It rendered the BBC News home page in just two seconds and we didn’t encounter any stuttering or jerky movements while scrolling through web pages. Its 1,280x720 resolution meant we still had to zoom in to make text a bit more legible in desktop sites, but its responsive touchscreen was a joy to use.
The display itself is very bright, but there were some noticeable imperfections when it came to overall image quality. Sony claims it uses similar technology to its Bravia TVs, but while colours were very sharp and vibrant, blacks were still quite grey. This was particularly noticeable when we placed it side by side with an AMOLED display, but even other LCD screens produced deeper blacks. This is a shame, but it’s certainly no worse than the Xperia Z.
Thankfully, its screen didn’t take its toll on the Xperia SP’s battery life. This is largely thanks to the large 2,370mAh battery, which meant the phone lasted 7 hours and 12 minutes in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to half brightness. This is about average for a modern smartphone.Sony’s customisations to the operating system are fairly minimal. It has a total of seven home screens. Sony’s entertainment apps, such as its Video and Music Unlimited services, are hidden away on its outer screens, leaving more room for your own apps on the central screen. A small portion of the screen is taken up by touch-sensitive back, home and menu controls, but we still had plenty of room to use the rest of the screen, including the keyboard. We were able to type quickly and accurately, and while we initially lamented the loss of full stop and comma keys on the first screen, these can be easily added back in using the keyboard settings wizard.
Where the Xperia SP falls down the most is its 8-megapixel camera. We liked having a physical shutter button, but while our outdoor shots had plenty of detail, colours often looked quite murky, even in bright sunshine. We also noticed quite a lot of noise, and clouds in particular were riddled with a light speckling of colour, even in lighter, whiter areas. Indoor shots were better, but the noise still persisted and it didn’t cope well in low lighting conditions.
Its video recording was similarly mediocre, as there was a lot of visible noise even in our brightly lit test room. Static white backgrounds positively shimmered during playback and it only got worse when we turned the lights off.
This will be disappointing to some, but thankfully Sony goes some way to make up for this by packing the Xperia SP full of extra features. Most of them require other Sony products in order to work, but the first of these is support for Sony’s PlayStation 3 Dualshock controller, which allows you to use a PS3 controller with the phone when playing games. Its built-in NFC also pairs up with NFC-enabled Sony Bravia TVs so you can mirror your phone content on the TV screen. The MirrorLink app, on the other hand, will let the phone connect with certain in-car entertainment systems and mirror what’s on screen.
The Sony Xperia SP is a fantastic phone. It has its flaws, but they’re not quite enough to stop it from being an outstanding mid-range handset. With all the speed and power of a high-end quad-core phone, it’s also brilliant value. It wins a Best Buy award.
Buy it now from T-Mobile on a very generous 500 minute, unlimited texts and unlimited data contract, and you'll get a free handset on a £26 per month contract, with a total cost of ownership of £624 over two years. That's a saving of around £300 compared to the Samsung Galaxy S4.
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