New Delhi, Jul 14: This rugged IP67 certified Android smartphone makes a loud and powerful impression with us in the first encounter itself.
Global consumer electronics giant Sony had recently announced the launch of its rugged, water and dust resistant Xperia Go smartphone internationally in the month of May this year and on Friday it was formally launched in India.
We got a chance to get our hands on with Sony's latest offering and here is our first impression.
The Xperia Go is built with the same idea as the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active but comes with an all new look along with the new Sony branding. The Sony Xperia Go comes loaded with goodies such as Mobile Bravia engine, a high resolution display, 8 GB of onboard memory and a mineral glass to protect the display from scratches and can withstand falls from small heights.
But lest find out more about the Xperia Go as we go hands on this device.
In terms of look and feel, the device is bold with its single colour body in matte finish. The Xperia Go comes in three colours including white, black and camel yellow.
All the colour options come with a similar matte finish body that resists scratches quite well. The device looks big all thanks to its 3.5 inch display but comes with an uncommon aspect ratio of 16:10 as opposed to 16:9 used by most smartphones these days.
The Xperia Go is the first smartphone to feature the IP67 (Ingress Protection) certification that underlines' the device's water resistant, water proof and dust proof characteristic. Users can use this device with even wet hands as it features the wet finder tracking.
The device's display is protected by a mineral glass that resists scratches including tougher ones and protects the glass form getting broken as well.
We have tried the Xperia Go under a continuous stream of water and it lives up to its reputation and is truly a rugged phone. You can check out the video from YouTube or click here.
The company has added a big battery in the device despite which the smartphone is quite slim and sleek making it very easy, lightweight and comfortable to handle. The overall black colour finish of the device that we saw looks great and the rough matte finish that has been given to the device helps make this device distinct in character as well.
The device features three capacitive touch keys like the ones featured by the Android ICS based devices, even though the device ships with Gingerbread. Notably, the company promises the Android Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade for the Xperia Go in the months to come.
The display of the device at 3.5 inches is quite big. The display has 320 x 480 resolution and 165 pixel per square inch pixel density, which although is not very good but makes it fun to see visuals clean and clear on the device.
In terms of brightness and colour reproduction, the display is great and the Bravia engine really makes a huge difference.
Xperia Go is powered with a 1 GHz dual core Novathor processor featuring the Mali 400 GPU coupled with 512 MB of RAM for faster performance. The device with its specially designed user interface is quite fast and never lacks anywhere from app execution to performance too.
The operating system on the other hand is sad for the device as of now. But with ICS more capabilities will be added to the device.
There is also a 5 megapixel camera which is capable of recoding 720p HD video. Its LED Flash helps in taking quality images in low light conditions as well. Along with that the camera is supercharged for faster operations with just about a second worth of time taken by the device to get ready for taking a shot right from standby.
The device will be made available in the country with a price tag of Rs 18,999 in the days to come.
