Gadgetory

today we're taking a look at the mid-range Sony Xperia L hey everybody I'm Chris look now the Sony Xperia L is a stylish mid-range phone in a sea of less stylish mid-range phones but is that enough to help it stand out let's dive into the review starting with the specs the Xperia L features a 4.3 inch FW VGA display and runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon s4 chipset with a one gigahertz dual-core CPU and Adreno 305 GPU for memory we have one gig of ram and 8 gigs of internal storage expandable by micro sd we have an 8 megapixel rear facing camera capable of 720p video capture and a 640 by 480 front-facing camera powering everything we have a 1750 milliamp hour battery unlike a lot of other mid-range phones from other manufacturers Sony doesn't make any sacrifices in the design department with the Xperia L one of the most distinctive features is the concave shape of the back of the phone as it almost gives the entire phone a curved look all of the hardware buttons like the volume rocker the power button and the camera shutter button are placed on the right side of the phone on the opposite side we have the USB port while the headphone jack is on top as is to be expected in phones of this class the display is okay but nothing great we have a 4.3 inch display with a resolution of 480 by 854 pixels resulting in a pixel density of around 228 pixels per inch while that isn't too sharp text and icons look surprisingly good for the most part colors are represented well and despite the low resolution photos and YouTube videos look pretty good to test the performance first we started with antutu benchmark we ran the benchmark ten times and took the average ending up with a final score of 10000 54 next up epic citadel which now has three quality modes we started with ultra high quality and got an average frame rate of around 41 frames per second moving to high quality the frame rate jumped up to an average of 50 1.7 frames per second while high performance gave a minor increase to around 50 2.4 frames per second real-world performance was solid and scrolling between home screens and in the app drawer gave us no performance hitches apps launched quickly and light gaming was no problem the Sony Xperia L runs Android 4.1.2 jelly bean and is skinned with Sony's custom UI which seemed to feel a little snappier than TouchWiz or HTC Sense changing the theme changes the color of the illumination bar which is a nice touch in addition to the stock google apps sony has included a few of its own like Walkman album and movies a few other apps are included like neo reader the very cool file commander and AAA stocks which should appeal to the more fiscally minded buyers of the Xperia L while the idea of an 8 megapixel camera might sound cool especially with the good reputation that Sony's image sensors have there isn't anything especially interesting about the Xperia L camera colors are well represented enough but images tend to be on the fuzzy side low-light performance isn't great and the included LED flash isn't much help there the same problems carry over to the 720p video capture the auto brightness changes very quickly and very noticeably but motion is fairly smooth though there doesn't appear to be any image stabilization present sony claims around eight and a half hours of top time for the Xperia L which we found usually matches up with moderately heavy use this seemed to be the case here around five hours of fairly heavy testing brought the battery down to around 33% while shooting and lighter testing on a different day brought it to just 61% real-world you should bitte running along the battery is removable so if you want to carry a spare or search for an extended battery that is possible in the end while its general performance is right in line with a whole bunch of other mid-range phones we've looked at what might give the Sony Xperia L a chance is its unique sense of style now everybody has different tastes so it might not appeal to you but it is definitely worth a look if you'd like to know more we have an in-depth written companion to this video on Android authority comm you can find the link to the article down in the description if you enjoyed this video or found it useful maybe share it with your friends or give it a like if you want to stay caught up with everything we're doing make sure to subscribe to our Channel I'm Chris look for Android authority and as always thank you for watching