7 days with Xperia Sola - First Impressions

For those of you, who know me, I still love Windows Phone and the killer hardware combination Nokia's Lumia range of devices has provided to it, but my love for Lumia 800 and Lumia 900 could not make me buy one. Instead I bought an Android powered smartphone, Sony Xperia Sola. This is my first Non-Nokia handset in the past 5 years. (Buckle Up Nokia, you lost another Customer :p) .
Jokes apart, as the name suggests, these are the first impressions of 'actually' owning an Android powered device (for a week now).

To start with, most of my friends questioned me about not buying Lumia 800/Lumia 900 as I love WindowsPhone+Nokia combination.  The short answer is, Windows Phone 7.5 is not mature enough, atleast not yet. I'm sure Windows Phone 8 will be, but 7.5 is not there. And as I've been using Symbian devices, like Nokia N8, Nokia 5800 etc. I needed a smartphone with a dedicated File Manager, Bluetooth File Transfer and the ability to sideload apps without rooting my phone and currently only Android provides it (as Symbian is a dead end), so I bought one.

Hardware
Xperia Sola is powered by a 1Ghz Dual Core ARMv7 processor, Cortex-A9 on The NovaThor U8500 chipset with a Mali-400 GPU. It also has a strong built and a good design. Similarly priced phones are HTC One V (has a Single Core CPU with an 8Mp Camera and ICS out of the Box) and Galaxy S Advance (Cheap, Ugly phone with a 768Mb of Ram as opposed to 512Mb of Xperia Sola). So Xperia Sola is a pretty decent bargain for its  price range . It is one of the few phones to have a Dual Core CPU, a good GPU and that too under 20K.

TimeScape UI
The TimeScape UI (Sony's Custom Skin) is ages better than TouchWiz 4 (Samsung's Android Skin). Even though it runs Android v2.3.7 a.k.a Gingerbread underneath, the UI looks and feel modern and mature. And Not to mention a planned upgrade to ICS is in the works for Q3. TimeScape may have lost a functionality or two like not being able to add or delete Home Screens, still it is a lot better than that kiddish looking ugly UI, which Samsung calls TouchWiz. TimeScape UI is smooth, possibly the smoothest out of all OEM's custom skins except HTC's Sense 4.0 which is almost as smooth except for scrolling in lists menus.

Multimedia (Camera & Music Player)
Sony did not disappoint me here again. Xperia Sola has 5 Mega-pixel camera  which is a huge downgrade from my N8.(The 12Mp Monster) but the photo quality makes up for the lost pixels. Photos are very-very good for a 5 Mp shooter with a single LED flash , resolved detail is superb and Auto-focus works well most of the times. Its just Sony's Image Processing Algorithms, that are still not perfect and tend to suppress noise , specially in low light conditions. Just for the info, it put a 8Mp shooter of a friend to shame two days back. :P
Music Player is good, Cover Flow is buttery smooth and it has an inbuilt option to edit tags, which I missed on my N8. Music player can also find you the YouTube video, lyrics or artist info for the song ,which comes in pretty handy. It can also find the album cover for you. Furthermore its UI is the Best I've seen on a smartphone.

Apps-Google Play Store
Google's Play Store is the 2nd largest app store (behind only apple's). And soon it'll overtake Apple's app store as well. But my experience with Play Store was a mixed bag. Most of the apps worked fine except one Game which refused to download saying "It is not Compatible with my Phone" .
The problem here is Fragmentation, probably the biggest problem with the Android platform from a developer point of view. Android devices are powered by different chipsets like NovaThor, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments and that too with a resolution support of 320x480 to 1920x1200. So application developed for a particular chipset/resolution may not work with your device.
Other than that,  Play Store is good and even allows wireless installation of applications from Play Store's website to your device which I found quite handy.

Battery
This is something Android devices has been criticised since day one, poor battery optimization. Xperia Sola has a Standard Lithium-Ion 1320 mAh battery which lasts for a day , at most (on Normal usage).
My N8 had a 1200 mAh Lithium-Ion battery , and that would last for about 2 days or more with similar usage. This is not Sony's fault completely, but Android has some major battery draining issues. To maximize battery life I have to disable Data Connectivity/Wifi when not in use, keep the brightness low and even disable Mobile Bravia Engine (which I'd love to keep on) and even then it last for a maximum of 18-20 hours. Still, thanks to the provided charger (5V-850mAh), the battery gets fully charged in just about an hour.


On the whole, except for the battery, the transition from Nokia N8 (Symbian Belle) to Xperia Sola has been quite smooth till date. And for anyone looking for a Good Looking Android Device under 20K, this smartphone is worth a look.


Feel free to shoot any comments.

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Android - Everything You Need To Know

"Android is probably the Most widely known and used Linux based Operating System." Only for mobile devices like Smartphones and Tablets, the OS has made a huge impact on the smartphone market which was previously dominated by Apple's iPhone, Nokia's Symbian and RIM's Blackberry OS . It didn't even stop there and is now giving a fierce competition to low and mid end feature phones whilst dominating the High end market.

Android was initially developed by Android Inc. However Google acquired 'Android Inc.' in August 2005 and made further developments with the Android Inc. team.
Android was first unveiled on November 5, 2007 by the Open Handset Alliance, an association of companies like Google, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung and a few more, as a platform for mobile devices based on Linux Kernel.

Android consists of forked Linux kernel , is based on ARM Architecture with the APIs written in C language and GUI in Java and XML. It is developed by Google under the project  'Android Open Source Project' which means anybody can download the source code and use it on their devices and the Best Part about it is that you won't have to pay anything to Google to use their OS.

Apps for Google's OS are compiled to produce Dalvik dex-code which runs in Dalvik Virtual Machine . Apps are written in Java, and dx tool converts .class files to .dex which can be executed on Android using Dalvik Virtual Machine. The reason Android used .dex executables but .class is the limited hardware capabilities of the mobile devices like processing power and memory as compared to standalone PCs and Laptop etc.(which use JVM).

The first Android powered mobile device was HTC Dream launched in October,2008 and ran Android v1.0 out of the box. However it gained popularity in mid 2009 when Google introduced Android v1.5 a.k.a Cupcake and along with it there new naming convention , where each updated version was to be named after a dessert in alphabetical order. However, the first Android phone I remember that actually made some news was Sony Ericsson(it was Ericsson then) Xperia X10 back in November 2009. It was 2010 when Android actually gained popularity, with Samsung, the largest smartphone vendor now, releasing their Android flagship Galaxy S in March, 2010. The phone didn't sell just well but quite well. As of 2011 Samsung has sold more than 10 Million Galaxy S. The phone was succeeded by another best seller Galaxy S-II in 2011 which , the recently launched Galaxy S-III will succeed .

Companies like HTC,Samsung,Sony,Motorola and few more local ones use Android as their primary Smartphone OS. Reasons are -

It is supported by Google, one of the largest Software Giants.
Second Largest and soon to be 'The Largest' Apps Store.
They don't have to pay anything to Google to use their OS.
Being Open Source, they can alter the UI and other functionalities to differentiate themselves from other Manufacturers.   

However being OpenSource has its disadvantages too. One of them is Fragmentation, that'll be discussed in other posts. As of Quarter1 of 2012, Android is leading the Smartphone market with a share of 59% with iOS being 2nd   at a market share of 23%.

Android ,despite its disadvantages, is leading the Smartphone Market and will do so for at least a few years to come. 

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