Introduction
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.
Before we go any further, let's check the Sony Xperia E3 review cheat sheet.
Key features
- 4.5" IPS LCD, 480 x 854px, 218ppi, shatter-proof glass, ambient light sensor
- LTE connectivity
- Android 4.4.2 KitKat with Xperia UI on top
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset with quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 processor, Adreno 305 GPU and 1GB of RAM
- 5MP camera, single LED flash, 1080p video recording
- VGA front-facing camera with video recording
- 4GB of built-in storage, expandable via the microSD card slot
- Active noise cancellation with a secondary microphone
- 2,330mAh battery; STAMINA Power Saving Mode
- Available in a variety of color options
Main disadvantages
- Low screen resolution
- Thick bezels make the device bigger than 4.5" peers
- Battery isn't user-replaceable
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.
Sony Xperia E3 at HQ
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.
Screen comes short on resolution
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.
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| The 4.5" display of the Sony Xperia E3 |
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.
| Display test | 50% brightness | 100% brightness | ||||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | |||
| - | - | - | 0.69 | 608 | 887 | |
| - | - | - | 0.77 | 725 | 942 | |
| 0.35 | 315 | 906 | 0.57 | 550 | 967 | |
| 0.42 | 387 | 916 | 0.7 | 651 | 929 | |
| 0.24 | 184 | 764 | 0.71 | 508 | 771 | |
| 0 | 226 | ∞ | 0 | 432 | ∞ | |
| 0.33 | 325 | 989 | 0.64 | 643 | 1000 | |
| 0.26 | 247 | 960 | 0.44 | 531 | 1094 | |
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.
Sunlight contrast ratio
- Sort by Label
- Sort by Value
- Expand
- Nokia 808 PureView 4.698
- LG G2 1.976
- OnePlus One 1.961
- Oppo R819 1.957
- Sony Ericsson Xperia ray 1.955
- Sony Xperia Z2 1.944
- Sony Xperia E3 1.943
- Nokia Lumia 1320 1.941
- HTC One mini 2 1.94
- Samsung Galaxy Camera 1.938
- Sony Xperia J 1.932
- Acer CloudMobile S500 1.931
- Samsung Galaxy mini 2 1.114
Battery life
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.
Sealed-in 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).
Connectivity
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 |
| +0.11, -0.10 | -87.0 | 87.1 | 0.0085 | 0.047 | -88.0 | |
| +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.
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Sony Xperia E3 review: Blue collar