[victor mel]

I see Phones4u are doing the Sony Xperia S (white) on pay as you go for £179. What this be a step up from a HTC EVO 3d which I currently have?

[jabbamk1]

Originally Posted by victor mel

I see Phones4u are doing the Sony Xperia S (white) on pay as you go for £179. What this be a step up from a HTC EVO 3d which I currently have?

errr not the biggest step up. The screen res is better as is the camera. But apart from that there is not much difference in terms of spec/size. Even the processor is pretty much the same.

For £179 it's an excellent buy though. It will be getting jellybean as well.

Personally for me it's not a big difference. But if you don't want a phone the size of the S3 or something then i can see the appeal. Especially if you need a good camera phone.

[MGS4SnakeRulez]

Says £229 on the website and that it comes with Gingerbread OS instead of ICS.

[jabbamk1]

Originally Posted by MGS4SnakeRulez

Says £229 on the website and that it comes with Gingerbread OS instead of ICS.

Comes with ICS now Will be getting Jellybean soon...ish

[MGS4SnakeRulez]

Originally Posted by jabbamk1

Comes with ICS now Will be getting Jellybean soon...ish

Nice Looks like a nice phone. Maybe £179 is the instore price and they haven't upgraded the website. There's a P4U shop here so I'll have a look in tomorrow.

[Ultraman1966]

Just a warning, Sony aren't the best in terms of maintaining updates. Case in point is my sister's Arc S which was a flagship in Autumn 2011, they released the ICS update by Summer 2012 but it was partly unusable. The phone became glitchy with random restarts and game incompatibility. I had to unlock her bootloader and install a custom ROM to make it usable again and we're still waiting for new firmware to patch things but I think Sony has pretty much abandoned it.

[jabbamk1]

Originally Posted by MGS4SnakeRulez

Nice Looks like a nice phone. Maybe £179 is the instore price and they haven't upgraded the website. There's a P4U shop here so I'll have a look in tomorrow.

It could be the upgrade price for pay as you go users? maybe?

For £179 you can't get a better phone in the UK. For £229... there might be a bit more competition but it's still an excellent price.

What ultraman said is also true, Sony aren't the best at testing updates/fixing bugs. Even people with the Xperia S on ICS say there are bugs that haven't been fixed yet. But Jelly bean should sort them out (but that could bring a whole load of other bugs)

It'll be fine as a phone though.

[Ultraman1966]

£179 is a steal but yeah, think long and hard if you're not that savvy with Android and ROM flashing.

[lee18xx]

That's an excellent price. I have the Sony Xperia T are the minute and it's brilliant. I had the S before and only got rid of it through changing network. Camera is wicked and the screen is beautiful. Definately one of the best handset manufacturers at this time

[MGS4SnakeRulez]

That's one of the isssues for me is that I don't wanna buy a buggy phone that's gonna get little to no support. If I'm paying almost £200 for a phone I expect it to at least be supported for a good while. Not pretty much abandoned within a year. I understand tech moves on and other phone's come out but they should still offer some support for other phones even if it's just bug fixes and not OS updates like ICS to JB etc

[The Sack]

I loved my Xperia S but the bugs drove me away in the end (but it is still in the family as the wife has it now), if you are going in to owning one and get it updated to the UK .453 release of ICS its great apart from the proximity bug which can be a royal pain in the arse.

Beautiful screen and brilliant camera, at £179 it really is a bargain.

[kev]

Don't bother - when it was released it ran smoothly and was a nice phone but with rubbish battery life. Now it's getting glitcher with each update, and the battery life is getting worse.

The cameras great, except when it decides it's going to take 30 seconds to launch as it's on another of it's "I'm going to run like treacle for now good reason" spaz outs.

[The Sack]

Hmmm on UK .453 ICS i was getting through 24 hours with over 70% battery life left somedays, fair enough that was light use but a day is easy enough with plenty of screen and 3g time. Only real bug was the occasional proximity sensor issue. The Xpera S readily falls in to deep sleep mode and will happily use only 1% per 2 or 3 hours overnight.

At £179 it is an absolute bargain.

[kev]

Originally Posted by The Sack

Hmmm on UK .453 ICS i was getting through 24 hours with over 70% battery life left somedays, fair enough that was light use but a day is easy enough with plenty of screen and 3g time. Only real bug was the occasional proximity sensor issue. The Xpera S readily falls in to deep sleep mode and will happily use only 1% per 2 or 3 hours overnight.

At £179 it is an absolute bargain.

I think the signal strength may have something to do with it!

Since we have had the Signal Box installed at work I've finally been getting some of the amazing battery life screenshots - normally in standby I was losing about 5-10% an hour when not using it - now it's not even 1% (and this is with Push turned on, but with Juice defender disabling it and enabling it).

What is noticeable is that the signal strength at work has gone from -116dBm to -40dBm, - at home is about -90dBm where it has historically lasted longer than work. Been on WCDMA only for a while now as the constant hunting between the four (T-Mobile GSM, T-Mobile 3G, Orange GSM, Orange 3G) networks would kill the battery by lunch time.

Alas, as soon as you use the MP3 player all bets are off and it munched battery life like it's going out of fashion

[The Sack]

I live in the sticks and signal strength is very poor, when you look on the battery app stats thing it very rarely shows as green, nearly all yellow (never checked the actual db in the status), my Xperia S was (or is now the wife has it) is set to WCDMA (preferred) / GSM and is also on T-Mobile / Orange / EE

Just found one of my old screen shots and it is at 77% battery left after 20 hours and 6 minutes using stock UK SIM free .453 ICS, Go Launcher EX, GO SMS Pro. Again that is with light use though as i was actualy seeing just how long it would last, any 3g and screen time will hammer the battery.

People losing 5 to 10% per hour is normally a sign they are running an old firmware (the old Xperia S GB firmwares were terrible in this regard) or they have an app playing up.