Sony has launched three smartphones this year; the top-of-the-range Xperia S, the mid-range Xperia P and this, the budget Xperia U. Being a Sony handset, it's more of a lower-mid-range phone than the ultra-cheap Android handsets we're used to seeing from Huawei or ZTE. It's fairly expensive on contract, but a bit of a bargain SIM-free at just £180.
The Xperia U has a similar design to its bigger brothers, with a chunky squared-off shape, plastic chin and translucent strip under the screen. This strip has icons for the usual Android back, home and menu functions but, confusingly at first, pressing on these doesn't activate the functions. Instead, the icons refer to the touch-sensitive buttons above the strip. The strip glows depending on what's on screen, so yellow for a photo of a sunny day and blue for a sea view. You can even change the colour of the chin beneath the strip; there's a replacement yellow one in the box.
We were big fans of the design. It's a small phone, so is easy to hold and use with one hand, as well as fitting easily in a pocket. Its relatively chunky thickness seems to work well with the phone's small size, and the phone feels well made, with little flex in the body.
After using the 4.8-inch Samsung Galaxy S3 for a couple of weeks, the Xperia U's 3.5-inch screen felt tiny. We soon got used to it, though, and began to appreciate the reasonably high 854x480-pixel resolution. This gives a 280 pixels-per-inch pixel density, which puts it up in the top tier of smartphones for display clarity. The screen is bright and text is sharp and clear; you'll just find yourself zooming in to web pages more than on a larger smartphone. Colours are vibrant and there's enough contrast for movies and games, but blacks aren't as deep as on AMOLED displays.
The Xperia U has a dual-core 1GHz processor, and we had no complaints about its performance. It runs Android smoothly and could render the BBC News homepage in just under five seconds, so is as quick as most smartphones we’ve seen. It currently only runs Android 2.3 rather than the latest Android 4.0 operating system, but Sony claims an update will be available in the third quarter of 2012. Battery life is below average at just five and a half hours in our video playback test, though, so charging every night is a must.Sony has customised Android to a certain extent. The new icons and animations are unobtrusive, and Sony's Timescape app and widgets aggregate your contacts' updates into one place. The main problem we had was that there are so many apps installed to begin with. Even after a factory reset, the Xperia U has four screens full of app icons. Many of these are useful, such as the Astro File Manager, but some seem to take up a needless amount of menu space. For example, the World Clock, Timer, Stopwatch and Alarm all have separate icons, but each just leads to a different tab within the same app.
The phone has plenty of space for apps, with nearly 6GB of total free internal storage, but there's no SD card slot for expansion. This will mainly limit the amount of room you have for music and movies, and possibly even photos. We were impressed with the Xperia U's camera, especially in daylight. There's a huge amount of detail and sharp focus. The colours are slightly too saturated, but overall photos are very pleasing. We were less impressed with indoor shots, which showed significant noise.
It's hard not to like the Sony Xperia U. It's well made, compact and fast, with a great screen and impressive camera, at least in daylight. It should also be upgraded to Android 4.0 in the next few months. With a contract the phone is around the same price as the HTC One S, which is a superior handset. However, the Xperia U is excellent value SIM-free; there's nothing around the £180 mark that can touch it. It's a Budget Buy.
