Sonic boon
The Neo’s single core processor means you’re limited to 720p HD video recording rather than going the whole 1080p hog, but its impressive looking nonetheless. As with the Arc, but not the Play – SE’s logic isn’t always apparent in these matters – the HDMI output allows you to view hi-res video and games on your TV. That said, you’ll need to supply your own HDMI cable. During tests, it worked a treat – simply plug and play.
Music sounds pretty good from the supplied headphones, which not always a given for earphone freebies. There’s also a ten-setting equaliser, plus the option to search the web for related videos for each of your tracks.
There’s 1GB of on-board storage, but before you get too excited, only around 320MB of it is user accessible. An 8GB micro SD card is supplied and you can beef that up to 32GB. The battery offered no surprises, delivering just about a day of fairly heavy use, so pretty much par for the course.
Visually appealing, aurally sound and nifty with it
Verdict
The Xperia Neo has much of the cool technology sported by Sony Ericsson’s top-notch Xperia Arc but at a fraction of the price. It’s not as slim, but if you can put up with the bulk, it’s really a bit of a bargain. ®
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Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo Android smartphone
COMMENTS
Nope
"The Neo’s single core processor means you’re limited to 720p HD video recording rather than going the whole 1080p"
Actually, modern smartphones are built using SoCs (System-on-chip) that incorporate multiple specialised chips for things like audio/image/video encode/decode. The ARM application processor (the single core you're referring too) will rarely be called upon to do 720p or 1080p encode, however many cores it has, as in most cases it's not possible and in any case it would drain your battery in no time.
When giving the specs for smartphone chips, publications usually (over)simplify things and just spout the frequency and number of ARM cores, but that is only a very small part of the performance story.
True
Saying it won't do 1080p video because it's rubbish is far more accurate.
Who cares anyway, the video may be high res but the quality will still be pretty poor.
Screen and Camera Issues
I have had the Neo for around 10 days and the photo quality is not as it's cracked up to be. There are some very noticeable artifacting due to overzealous compression on the phone which cannot be disabled. There is also a very noticeable flickering of the screen in poor light due to an over sensitive auto-brightness sensor directly above the screen. How that was missed is anyone's guess.
Skype?
The reviewer has missed one of the main features of the Neo - it's one of only four handsets that officially support Skype video calling. Would have been nice to see that being tested.
This was...
...a review for a phone, right? Strange really, because I distinctly don't recall reading anything about its primary purpose, i.e. being a phone!
I'm cancelling my subscription, etc.
