Sony Yuga 5" Full HD phone gets previewed, your microSD prayers are answered
Eldar Murtazin promised yesterday that he will be ready with a preview of a wild Sony Yuga prototype today, and kept it. We get to see the design, specs are confirmed, and some benchmarks are thrown in, but unfortunately he says the camera samples were not that great, and, since this is still a preproduction model, he kept them to himself.
Now for the specs - a 5" 1080x1920 pixels display with Mobile BRAVIA engine, a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro clocked at 1.5 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, 12 MP Exmor RS camera on the back, and 16 GB of internal memory. A lot of firsts for Sony, but so far nothing to set the phone apart from the Droid DNA, for example, or the barrage of Full HD 5-inchers that are coming from Samsung, LG and others.
Well, not really, there is one very key difference here - Sony managed to find place for a microSD card slot on the side of the unibody chassis, and even threw in a microHDMI port for hooking it up to a TV, how's that for a well-rounded device.
Murtazin says the screen resolution and colors with the Mobile BRAVIA engine are great, but they seem a bit off in the interface, and viewing angles are weak - something we've observed with most high-res mobile screen from Sony this year. Still, this is a minor gripe considering you get a very compact and reportedly water tight unibody with micro SIM, microSD and microHDMI slots around it, protected with rubber lids.
The Sony C6603 Yuga was rumored to come with a glass chassis, like the Optimus G/Nexus 4, but Eldar mentions that it looks like plastic with a shiny glass-looking coat on top of it, so the jury is still out on it, but he mentions that it looks and feels premium. Sony achieved such compact dimensions by eschewing the usual physical or capacitive buttons underneath the display, using on-screen navigation for getting around the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean interface, which is definitely the way to go with such big-screen handsets.
As far as the lofty camera expectations, Murtazin shoots them down mentioning that despite all the marketing terms behind the new Exmor RS BSI sensor, the 12 MP camera takes no better pics than the Xperia T, for instance, which means nothing to write home about, and low light photos are trouble. Still, he acknowledges that this is a prototype version, so he didn't post any samples, and comments that the hardwired HDR video mode is a first on a phone and yields pretty good results. We'd have to add that there are some new camera UI options, like Superior Auto and Pet modes, as well as more color effects.
source: Mobile-review
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: