Sony makes cell phones? My thoughts on the Experia L1

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too long, didn’t read: https://youtu.be/HYZkCAjy-do

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I’m not sure about you guys but I completely forgot that Sony made cell phones. Why can’t they make at least a some what popular phone? It’s so funny, you’d think that they would have the upper hand over companies like OnePlus and BLU with having so much money to work with.

So I saw this phone at Microcenter for about 190 bucks and it was a Sony phone, I just had to try this thing out and find out why I’ve never seen one Sony phone on display or in the pockets of any of my tech friends.

What the phone made me realize is that I would be happy to use a 720p phone display. People often underestimate screen resolution on cell phones. But the screen was freaking beautiful and the colors popped.
Sure, it’s super awesome to be double 1080p, but you are excuse my language…raping the CPU and the GPU on all of your tasks especially if they aren’t down scaled sucks to me.

It makes no sense, it’s a cell phone. If I had my choice, I would run a giant battery and an overkill CPU along with a ridiculous amount of ram and two beautiful cameras. The phones ROM would be optimized to run at a slower clock speed, that way when you’re feeling frisky you can just launch into no fucks mode where the phone destroys everything.

But as the Sony phone goes that I can give them a bit of credit on is that their bloatware and ROM skin really isn’t too bad, especially comparing it to Samsungs bloatware list and odd half baked addons.

The bloatware included on the phone was some basic apps that everyone uses, spotify, amazon, etc. AND THEN AVG, do virus scanners even work in Android? It just seems like they entice fear into users to push their premium software. Personally I haven’t seen actual viruses on Android but more just adware that interferes, that’s easily removed. But I removed and disabled all add on software that I could. That’s another thing. AVG, isn’t baked into the ROM. It’s just a piece of software, why do phone manufacturers only allow me to “disable” software as opposed to uninstalling it? All of this software is located on the app store anyway.

The battery was really good too, but the specs were a bit garbage in my opinion. But it makes sense, a 720p screen really isn’t demanding. What the odd part is that often these phone companies jump the core count train or the RAM train. But this phone was not hopping on any trains to get users to buy the phone. I didn’t see any specs that were amazing. What was sad, I thought the trade of specs would of translated into a better camera, but both cameras were muddy in comparison to my iPhone 6s+. The cpu is a 1.4ghz quad core, 16gb of internal storage and 1.5gb of RAM.

But now I see the reason why people aren’t buying these phones. In my eyes they beat a lot of the phone makers in this price point with build quality, but with specs and software I see literally no upper advantage.

But what I suggest to everyone is that if you are under budget, buy an android phone used and if your geeky make sure XDA has a great ROOT/ROM community. That way you can have the phone last a couple more years. But the great part about android is that everyone and their brother manufactures android phones. So this means you can take advantage of lack of demand and lowball on craigslist. Get yourself a flagship phone from a year ago off craigslist.

Anyway, sorry I like to ramble. I like to talk about things. haha.

3 Likes

I have a Sony Z3 compact bought new in 2014. The battery life is still great and though it lacks some of the more modern features like fingerprint reader, it’s good enough for me for a couple of years at least. If I were to buy a new phone today it’d be the Sony XZ1 compact. That’s the thing I think Sony has done better than all their competitors. Making a flagship specced device in three sizes. Normally when Samsung does thing the only thing the models share is the name, but with Sony it’s the same internals, only with another screen and battery.

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I will say this: I’m a bit of a Sony fanboy…
So here’s the deal:
When reviews roll out, people talk about the highest of high end phones. Sony had a couple of Z branded high end phones that wasn’t quite up there with the best and they were getting bad press for it.
On the other hand, my father or my mother, I lost track who, is using my old 5+ years old Sony phone. They said it had over a week of battery charge. I am using a 3 years old E4… Cracked the touch about 4 months ago. Works perfectly no matter what.
Many people just look at reviews - Samsung gets great reviews, I’m buying Samsung. So there…
My next phone will be Sony again. I am and I have always been happy with Sony’s products, be it cassette player back in the day, dvd players at my old job, psp more recently and now my phones.

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I have a Sony Xperia XA1 Ultra, and this phone is awesome for a midrange phone. $340

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I’ve been rocking a z5 compact for almost two years and I really like that you get a small phone with reasonable specs. Not a fan of huge phones, I’m a store everything in your pocket, kind of guy…

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