Sony’s list of Xperia handsets is starting to expand ever more rapidly. Today the Sony Xperia U has landed on the shelves at Three. It’s a tidy looking phone that’ll no doubt be a great entry point into Android for many, but is the price a little too high to win it the mass appeal that it deserves?
Three has announced that it’ll happily shift you a Sony Xperia U for £170 on PAYG. That’s a reasonably middle ground price for a phone with a 3.5-inch LED backlit LCD display, a 5-Megapixel camera and 512MB of RAM, not to mention some pretty swish industrial design.
However (there’s always a ‘however’), it’s launching with Android 2.3. Now, we’re getting a bit tired of saying this, but at this stage we really should be seeing smartphones in this sort of price-range launching with Android 4.0. Especially as there’s no date attached to the Xperia U in terms of an update.
It’s got us thinking: if the nearest Android rival to the Xperia U is the HTC One V, which packs in Android 4.0 but costs £230 for the privilege, what’s a more likely competitor? We’ll tell you what: the Nokia Lumia 710, which you can get for as little as £130.
The Lumia 710 runs on Windows Phone, has a larger 3.7-inch display and provides free satnav mapping from Nokia.
So, here’s the question we’re posing: If you had to choose a phone to ease you from the land of the feature phone to the smartphone kingdom (yes, kingdom), which would you choose? Answer the poll below to let us know:
