Sony's cheapest LTE smartphone - that is the Xperia E3 key selling
point, but is there more to it than that? With the same design language
as the Sony Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact, the E3 looks well up-to-date and
gives you the latest Android KitKat decked out in Sony team colors.
Aiming for a low price point is always going to involve some corner
cutting but, as Motorola's Moto G has shown, the overall experience
doesn't necessarily need to be sub-par.
We can probably live with the not-too-slim bezels, but we won't put
up with poor performance. Fortunately, the Snapdragon 400 inside the
Xperia E3 has a good track record and the WVGA resolution shouldn't put
too much strain on it.
The Sony Xperia E3 is an improvement over its predecessor in every
way possible, which is probably why Sony chose to skip through E2 - the
two digit improvement was needed to underline the big jump forward.
Sony prides itself on the battery performance of the Xperia E3, the
company says it could go a full two days thanks to its 2,330mAh battery
and STAMINA mode optimizations. We've yet to confirm that claim but it
could potentially become a stand-out feature in a market where
entry-level smartphones can barely make it through the day.
That, along with the premium design, the LTE radio and the exclusive
built-in software should help the Xperia E3 withstand the pressure from
720p screen-packing competition. While clinging close to stock Android,
the Xperia E3 has the custom Xperia UI with the What's New panel,
TrackID, Album, Walkman, Movies and Xperia Themes, to name a few.
It isn't like us to deny a smartphone a fair hearing and the Xperia E3's trial begins after the break.
The display of the Sony Xperia E3 has a 4.5" diagonal and an IPS
matrix but the resolution isn't too impressive. Sony has gone for a
480x854 pixel resolution that stretches a little thin for around 218
pixels per inch.
While that number doesn't translate into superb sharpness, the
display of the Xperia E3 isn't too bad for its class. Sure, the Moto G
and a few others have it easily beaten, but WVGA and qHD screens are
still very much the norm here.
Viewing angles are good for the most part. There is some loss of
contrast at some angles but colors remain the same. Speaking of colors,
the Xperia E3 offers good, saturated colors on its LCD.
The pixel arrangement of the Xperia E3 is standard RGB with
equally-sized green, red and blue pixels. Here it is under a microscope.
The display of the Xperia E3 has okay blacks, about on par with its
competition. Contrast was good and the screen can get very bright too
making it an overall solid offering. The only area where it's lacking is
the sharpness - at just 218 ppi things aren't as sharp as on the Moto G
and Moto G (2014) displays.
The sunlight legibility of the Xperia E3 display is okay and about
the same as the upper Xperia Z2. It's certainly usable outdoors even if
it's not the prettiest sight.
The Sony Xperia E3 has a sealed 2,330mAh battery inside. We would've
liked the option to swap it out for a spare since the back panel of the
Xperia E3 is removable, but we will still be okay as long as it offers
good enough battery.
And that's just what we got from the Sony Xperia E3, which managed to
go on a charge for 75 hours or just over 3 days of use if you stick to
our pattern of an hour of talking, an hour of web browsing and an hour
of video watching per day. This means Sony's claim of 2 days is well
justified as the Xperia E3 should last for 48h even if you use it fairly
heavily (and particularly if you don't watch lots of video, which
turned out to be its weak spot).
The Sony Xperia E3 comes in single and dual SIM flavors. It has
quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and either tri-band or quad- depending
on the market. LTE is its key strength here and comes in quad-band
penta-band and hexa-band options.
The rest of the connectivity features include single-band Wi-Fi b/g/n
and Wi-Fi Direct. There is also support for Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and
GLONASS, plus an FM radio with RDS. There is also NFC connectivity with
support for Android Beam for sending files to other Android devices.
There's no IR port, though.
The ultra-low power ANT+ connectivity protocol handles connections to
various sports accessories such as heart rate monitors or bicycle speed
& cadence meters.
There is a microUSB 2.0 port for charging and data connections. Media
transfer mode is supported for accessing the phone's built-in memory
and microSD card over the USB cable.
The microUSB 2.0 port can also be used in On-the-go mode for
connecting USB peripherals such as pen drives, keyboards or real USB
hard drives.
The microUSB port doesn't have any TV-out functionality, but if you
own a compatible HDTV, you can output your phone's screen wirelessly via
the Miracast protocol or Sony's Xperia Connectivity Throw option. The
app allows you to share your media through DLNA by creating a media
server and connect to a PlayStation DUALSHOCK 3 wireless controller.
Android KitKat with Xperia flavor
The Sony Xperia E3 comes with Android 4.4.2 KitKat out of the box.
The launcher looks identical to what you would see on any other KitKat
Xperia smartphone, like the Xperia M2 Aqua we recently reviewed. If you
aren't familiar with it, you can check out this quick video below to get
you up to speed.
The lockscreen is the usual affair - it supports widgets (one per
pane), while the rightmost pane will fire up the camera. There are a few
available default widgets, but you can always get more from the Play
Store. Also third party apps oftentimes come with their own set of extra
widgets.
Naturally, you can protect your lockscreen by Face, Pattern, PIN or Password unlock, in ascending order of security.
Xperia lockscreen
There are five homescreen panels by default and you can set any of
them as your primary one. You can't have more than seven panes at any
given time though, nor can you change the order they're in.
Homescreen
You can set various live and static wallpapers, add widgets and shortcut, or change the UI theme.
Customization • Themes
The notification area lists notifications in the default tab with a
separate tab for Quick Settings. You can gain quick access to the Quick
Settings tab with a two-finger swipe from the top. The toggles are
customizable and you can choose between 20+ different toggles and have
up to 12 of them visible in their dedicated page. Holding a finger over
any toggle will give you direct access to its menu listing.
Notification area • Quick settings
The app drawer is laid out across multiple pages and you can sort the
apps manually, alphabetically, by the most used or most recently
installed. The menu with those settings is accessible via a swipe from
the left edge of the screen and you can also search and even uninstall
apps from there.
App drawer
The Xperia E3 uses the stock Android task manager that lets you
switch between recently opened apps, as well as terminate them with a
side-swipe.
The so-called "small apps" are also available in the Xperia M2 Aqua
and are accessible via the task manager. They are similar to Samsung's
Mini Apps, and pop up tiny widget-like applications on your homescreen,
which you can move around and use without having to open the
full-fledged app. So far, there's a default set of nine: Active Clip,
Chrome Bookmarks, Browser, Calculator, Calendar, Gmail, Timer, Notes,
and Touch Lock. You can launch only one instance of a Small App, but you
can open multiple Small Apps simultaneously.
You can download more Small Apps off the Play Store or use the option
to turn your favorite widgets into Small Apps. Just hit the Plus key at
the top of the list and choose a widget. Sadly you can't disable the
small apps entirely and will always have them cramming your recent apps
whether you use them or not.
Task switcher • Small apps
Naturally, you can access Google Now by swiping from the bottom of
the UI. There's another shortcut right next to the Google Now launch key
called What's new. This app has very beautiful UI and will show you the
hottest apps and multimedia today, but it isn't limited to the Play
Store only. It'll display content from Sony's PlayStation store too.
What's new
Finally, Google Now integrates with your Google account and can
access your daily routine, internet searches, email, etc. and give you
information relevant to your interests and daily needs.
The built-in 4GB of storage filled up pretty fast and the Xperia E3
needed a microSD card to help carry the load. And while we quickly
obliged and moved the images, videos and other multimedia files over to
the card apps were harder to move. You can transfer most of the built-in
and all of the downloaded apps into the external memory but that would
take you precious time and digging through the menus.
Album
We should all be familiar with Sony's custom gallery - Album. It
organizes images into groups of thumbnails and sorted by date. You can
change the thumbnails size by pinching.
Unlike previous versions there isn't a homepage that hosts all of
your albums, instead you get the same swipe-able menu the app drawer is
offering. There you can find all of your online and offline albums.
The gallery can connect to online albums (PlayMemories, Facebook,
Picasa, Flickr) and also to other devices on the local network. Maps and
Globe albums are also available, which use the geotagging info to sort
photos by the location at which they were taken, and faces, which groups
photos by the faces of the people in them.
Album
Images can be cropped or rotated directly in the gallery. Quick
sharing via Picasa, Email apps, Facebook, Bluetooth or MMS is also
enabled.
Viewing an image
Walkman
The Walkman music player is part of the equipment of all recent
Xperia smartphones. It features Music Unlimited integration and is not
above trying to sell you songs, but you can hide the Music Unlimited
stuff.
The Walkman interface is based on a hidden swipe-able menu that sort
your music collection by Artist, Albums, Playlists, all songs and even
the songs your friends are listening to (but you need to connect the
player with your Facebook account). You can pop up the menu the same way
you'd do it in the app drawer or the gallery - just swipe from the left
edge of the screen.
The Music Unlimited stuff includes ways to discover new music -
Charts, New releases and Channels. Those can be hidden individually
(same goes for the artist/album/playlist tiles) or you can disable the
service altogether.
The Infinite button is available in the Now Playing screen (just tap
the album art) - it will help you find the track's video on YouTube,
look up info about the artist on Wikipedia and search for lyrics on
Google. Gracenote is used here too and it can automatically download
information about your tracks and album art.
Walkman
The Walkman player offers a variety of audio settings - ClearAudio+
option is here, which determines the best audio quality settings
depending on the song you're listening to. We liked how it changed the
music and carefully accentuated various details. Dynamic normalizer
evens out the differences in volume between tracks, which is great if
you've mixed multiple albums from multiple sources.
The Sound enhancements contain yet more settings. There's an
equalizer with presets and manual settings (including tweaking Clear
Bass). Then there's Surround sound mode, which imitates the Studio, Club
or Concert Hall experience. The Clear stereo mode enhances the
perceivable stereo channel separation. Dynamic normalizer minimizes the
difference in volume between songs (great if you're playing a shuffled
mix).
Speaker settings include Clear Phase, which adjusts the quality, while xLOUD boosts up the internal speaker.
Sound settings
FM Radio
There's also an FM Radio. The app features multiple visualizations
and integrates with TrackID to recognize the currently playing song. You
can even directly send an "I'm listening to..." post to Facebook.
FM Radio and TrackID
Audio output is clean but quiet
The Sony Xperia E3 audio output is quite similar to that of its more
pricy stablemates. It managed some very good scores in our test,
although its volume levels were far from impressive.
The smartphone had spot-on frequency response, great dynamic
range, excllent signa-to-noise ration and no distortion when used with
an active external amplifier. Very solid performance with the sub-par
volume levels the only thing to potentially frown at.
Plugging in a pair of heaphones causes an average increase in stereo
crosstalk and introduces some distortion. Frequency response also
suffers a bit, but none of the three readings are too bad overall and
quite easy to accept at this price point.
And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.
| Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic
range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
| Sony Xperia E3 | +0.02, -0.07 | -88.7 | 86.9 | 0.011 |
0.015 | -89.4 |
| Sony Xperia E3 (headphones attached) | +0.46, -0.05 | -81.8 | 86.5 | 0.011 |
0.217 | -58.9 |
| Sony Xperia M2 Aqua | +0.02, -0.08 | -86.5 | 87.5 | 0.0077 |
0.015 | -87.9 |
| Sony Xperia M2 Aqua (headphones attached) | +0.10, -0.04 | -86.4 | 87.4 | 0.026 |
0.060 | -57.4 |
| Sony Xperia M2 | +0.02, -0.08 | -86.6 | 87.6 | 0.0076 |
0.014 | -88.1 |
| Sony Xperia M2 (headphones attached) | +0.08, -0.05 | -86.5 | 87.5 | 0.023 |
0.056 | -49.5 |
| LG G2 mini | +0.12, -0.03 | -93.5 | 93.3 | 0.0023 |
0.015 | -92.7 |
| LG G2 mini (headphones attached) | +0.09, -0.01 | -93.1 | 92.9 | 0.012 |
0.042 | -61.7 |
| Samsung Galaxy S4 mini | +0.06, -0.05 | -93.5 | 92.7 | 0.0090 |
0.056 | -86.2 |
| Samsung Galaxy S4 mini (headphones attached) | +0.08, -0.04 | -93.2 | 91.8 | 0.029 |
0.089 | -53.3 |
| Sony Xperia L | +0.11, -0.10 | -87.0 | 87.1 | 0.0085 | 0.047 | -88.0 |
| Sony Xperia L (headphones attached) | +0.58, -0.12 | -86.7 | 86.8 | 0.010 | 0.169 | -58.5 |
Sony Xperia E3 frequency response
You can learn more about the whole testing process
here.
Movies
The video playing app is dubbed Movies and it too has a great custom
UI. It's connected to Gracenote, which helps you find additional
information about the movies and TVs you have on the phone. It will even
download posters for them and for movies, it will download metadata
like genre, synopsis, director and cast.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well for TV shows - it doesn't
recognize the S01E02 format and won't pull info about individual
episodes. It gets worse, Gracenote seems to be lacking info on TV shows
in general, we couldn't find even popular shows like The Big Bang
Theory.
Movies
The Sony Xperia E3 was able to handle videos up to 1080p resolution.
It had issues with the AC-3 audio codec and failed to load sound in
videos carrying it but that's mostly normal for smartphones these days.
MKV movies didn't play at all along with FLV and some AVI files (most
played fine). The most popular DivX and XviD played just fine.
The video player lacks subtitle support by default but offers a
built-in movie editor that will let you trim videos and adjust speed.
5MP camera is nothing worth writing home about
The Sony Xperia E3 has a modest 5MP camera on the back accompanied by
a single LED flash. The video capture stands at 1080p at 30fps -
nothing to get overly excited about but also nothing to be ashamed of.
In fact the Moto G only manages 720p video recording, so the Xperia E3
has the upper hand here.
The camera interface consists of two panes and is unified with the
camcorder one - you can snap a photo or shoot a video without changing
modes most of the time. In some shooting modes, though, the video
shutter key may be replaced by a still/video mode toggle.
In the full resolution Manual mode you also get access to "manual
controls" on the viewfinder, which sounds more impressive than it really
is. There's an exposure compensation slider and a white balance
selector. You can also control the ISO, metering and focus modes, turn
on/off image stabilization, but those are buried in the settings menu.
Camera app
Then, there are the Augmented Reality effects, which stamp one of
several virtual worlds over your scene and you can even move around in
this world thanks to some intriguing motion tracking effect (note that
it needs real-life visual cues in the scene to track your motion).
Children might love this mode, but us bitter adults are unimpressed.
Creative effects features a number of effects that you can apply to
images. Each effect is showcased in real time so you can see it in
action before you press the shutter. There are 17 effects in total among
which are Comic, Kaleidoscope, Harris shutter, Comic, Fisheye and
Mosaic.
Social live lets you share a live feed over Facebook, Timeshift burst
captures a burst of photos and starts even before you're pressed the
shutter and finally Sweep Panorama. You can also download additional
camera apps from Sony.
Shooting modes
The Sony Xperia E3 might have an ample software package but it's
hardly the most impressive around in terms of quality. Images captured
with its 5MP shooter have only average amount of detail, but at least
noise is kept under control and there are no sharpening halos. We did
notice a lot of soft patches on many of the images suggesting less than
perfect lens.
Colors are okay if a bit dull and the exposure was mostly spot on,
but the dynamic range is very limited. The Xperia E3 was quick to focus
and capture images, at least.
Sony Xperia E3 camera samples
Macro samples do better in terms of detail - the lens issues aren't
visible when the focus is set to so close. However, the phone is unable
to go very close to the subject and you can really capture really fine
detail or achieve significant background blur.
Sony Xperia E3 macro samples
The Xperia E3 offers high dynamic range shooting in which it aims to
expose the scene's shadows better and not allow the highlight to clip.
The shooting mode brings back a fair amount of shadow detail back, but
really ruins the contrast of the shots and the final result is barely
usable.
HDR Off • HDR On
Panorama samples weren't impressive either. The Sweep panorama
software was able to stitch the different images into an up to 5MP image
- hardly great resolution and while its per-pixel detail isn't too bad,
the limited dynamic range is an even more obvious issue here.
Sony Xperia E3 panorama sample
Finally you can check out our photo quality comparison tool for more
pixel peeping. Sadly the flawed camera performance of the Sony Xperia E3
is magnified in the charts we have in the tool as they showcase the
resolving abilities of the sensor as well as how it deals with color
rendition and more.
Sony Xperia E3 in our photo compare tool
1080p video is better than what competitors over
In the grand scheme of the Xperia E3 the still shots do better in
their own 5MP league than the 1080p videos compare to their peers.
Videos look very poor for FullHD and actually appear more akin to 720p
(or perhaps even lower) upscaled to 1080p. Then again given that most of
the competition does 720p clips (and not very good ones at that), it's
not all bad for the Xperia E3.
Detail is scarce and there are blotches and artifacts all over the
scene of the videos. The framerate is a less than perfectly smooth,
fluctating between 24fps and 22-23fps at any given moment during
recording. This results in a somewhat choppy video at times.
Interestingly, the bitrate is high for the result you're getting -
21Mbps. Perhaps the Sony Xperia E3 unit we have for review has issues
with its optics that won't be present on all units. Still take a look at
a sample below and consider yourselves warned.
Here goes a 1080p@24fps sample directly from the Sony Xperia E3.
And finally you can compare the footage of the Xperia E3 in our studio to other smartphones we've tested.
Final words
The Sony Xperia E3 wants to make a splash but not rock the boat of
Sony's other midrangers. Now, that sounds like a tough brief but the
Xperia E3 might just have enough to get noticed in the crowded mid-range
market.
Bang for buck is key here and the most affordable Xperia of this
generation offers plenty of it. The sub-720p screen counts against, but
it readily over-delivers in other departments.
The battery life is arguably its most potent weapon - the Xperia E3
can easily outlast most of its rivals and by a very comfortable margin
too. LTE and the exclusive Sony apps work in its favor, the solid build
earning it some extra points. Unfortunately, the camera is no better
than we are used to - despite the generous promises on paper.
X ******************************************************************************X
Introduction
HTC Nexus 9 hands-on