[Sony Xperia P, U, Sola, Go] kenwchan:
Interesting thread. I am one of those who gave up on the OneX after 3 weeks and got an Xperia S. BTW I love Samsung's Galaxy Note but my wife won't give it back to me. Here are some practical comments I would like to share.

My OneX did not have yellow dots but if I pressed a little too hard on the upper left corner, I would see a LCD ripple. Didn't give me much confidence. The camera's pictures was not as good as an iPhone 4 which I suppose is a benchmark. It sure focussed fast but f2.0 didn't help much with motion blur indoors, but that's par I guess. The video was awful and usually I could only get a 20 fps framerate, 30fps required bright sunlight and even then the video seemed choppy. This was at 720p even. But, I will miss: the voice input on the HTC was almost "realtime" - it's amazingly helpful. And also, the sound was really good with the Beats profile, even with other headphones being used. Also, the ability to mount the hard disk easily on a mac was also great. Lastly, the HTC keyboard was very easy to type on. Almost forgot: I got a "loading" wait time every 1 in 20 presses of the home button on the HTC and would have to wait for the launcher to load. And HTC also cluttered up by notes in my contacts list with Sense info. So many annoyances. So ditched it.

So going to Sony, I lose the ability to mount my disk (i am encountering bugs with Sony Bridge on my mac - duplicate folders, messy stuff like that), lose the awesome voice typing, miss Beats audio (not a big deal though). I also miss HTC's Facebook integration, I think it better than the way Sony does it. I liked HTC's camera filters but I guess 3rd party software like CameraZoom would do that too.

I like the Sony's music player simplicity and the studio surround simulation sounded kinda neat for some time on my S4a Klipsch earphones. I love the ability to use the shutter button to take a quick snap, and the pictures are fairly decent, I would say slightly under par with iPhone, but still nice. Video seems to be about as good as you can expect from a phone. The phone is fast enough for most expectations. + I like the coloured notification light! By the way conversations seem to be more clear on the Sony, and the speaker is better too on the Sony. I also like the ease of HDMI out but don't like that the screen has to stay on when using it. But, I get a lot of clutter when using the HDMI when the phone is jumping from different screens - maybe a change of resolution is making the HDMI go crazy (is this normal?). I did not try HDMI out with the HTC.

I thought 4.7" was nicer size than 4.3" screen, but could get used to the difference I suppose. It's all small after using a Galaxy Note.

I don't like that Sony used a different standard on the headphone jack so that my old iphone headsets won't work with it. I don't like having to use a thumbdrive to transfer my stuff to my phone rather than connect directly (with a mac). I thought I could use Google Wallet but doesn't seem to support Xperia (and maybe it's not such a great idea anyways).

As for battery life, I think both are pretty comparable. Neither is very good, but neither was my SG2. My Galaxy Note was the only phone I thought could hold its own on battery life. I know the HTC is supposed to have a new firmware that dealt with battery and the HTC sense crash but I didn't have much confidence in the quality assurance of HTC at this point. My friend has already returned two phones already.

I am rambling. Overall, the Sony will tie me over for now, until the Samsung SG3 gets here! End my review (rant) of practical issues with both phones.

Cheers

Ken

---------- Post added at 07:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:55 PM ----------

One more comment on the Sony - for some reason - there is no speed dialing and also no groups. I possibly this will change with ICS update?

Rgds

Ken