Sony Xperia S - the first Sony-only branded smartphone - Hands on

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After its recent aquisition of Ericsson's part of their joint business, Sony today declare that it would selling phones under only its name alone. With that sorted it thn announced the Sony Xperia S as the first such phone to launch globally, in the first quarter of 2012. We got to get our hands on it at Sony's CES press conference this evening.

The handset is very well specified in most respects. The big 4.3in display isn't OLED, but it does have a 720p resolution and is the first to boast a new Bravia-based image processing engine for better image quality. Exactly what this amounts to isn't clear yet, but the screen was certainly a good effort with plenty of colour and contrast for an LCD and tons of lovely detail.

Once again Sony has put its camera expertise to use here, so that screen gets some great images to display too. There's a whopping 12-megapixel camera on this handset, and it can go from standby to taking a shot in just 1.5 seconds. Image quality looked god on the screen, but we couldn't get the images off to really see if those extra pixels are working for you, or against you in the form of additional noise.

Video is also well-supported shooting 1080p from the main back camera, but also an incredible 720p for video chat from the front camera. It can also share files through DLNA as well as the usual HDMI output.

The handset definitely looks to be built for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) as it has three invisible touch-sensitive buttons below the screen which are labelled by icons in a translucent strip of plastic below. The design is pretty stylish but its not the slimmest handset we've seen by some degree. At present though it's running Android 2.3.7 - which is a new one on us.

There's no dual-core processor here, in fact we can't recall any Sony handsets with one, so it seems to be a definite choice by the company. The single core chip does run at a speedy 1.5GHz though, so you shouldn't see many slowdowns.
The Ericsson branding may be gone, but this handset doesn't seem to be a big departure from previous models, and why should it as Sony simply acquired the ongoing business. It's no bad thing anyway, as we really liked the recent Xperia Arc S. We look forward to giving this a full review when its released in the near future.

Author: Seth Barton at CES in Las Vegas

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