Sony Smartphone

Xperia E3

The Sony Xperia E3 is no beauty at all. Elegant are not even Sony's flagships, but despite the corners, the Z series looks very premium. If you think the premium content away, you see nothing but a brick. The top and bottom edges of the phone are gigantic and the larger screen edges on the side you will not easily find in other smartphones.

Within those borders is a huge LCD screen with a low resolution of 480 x 854 pixels. That's not nice, not even on a relatively small 4.5 inch screen. HD should still be considered as a minimum. However, a bad screen is mild for the battery, and that marks the endurance.
The E3 is not fast, though, the Snapdragon 400 does make great performance, and you can play a typical smartphone game thanks to its adreno graphics. The simple Sony Skin is present, and quite often we noticed that smooth scrolling through the apps was counteracted by the skin.

The internal memory is four gigabytes. Enough for some apps but by intensive use, you will have to invest in an additional memory card. The E3 runs Android 4.4.2, not the latest version but still recently enough.
The Xperia E3 is equipped with a main camera of five megapixels that lets you take decent pictures, but nothing more. However, do not expect artistic highlights in low exposure. The front camera with its VGA resolution is no longer of this time. Sony chose not to place a dedicated camera button on the device, something that the brand does in most expensive devices and that we are missing here.

179 euros (at time of writing) www.sony.com
+ Battery
- Cheap appearance, giant edges, bad screen, no camera button.