Sony Xperia E4G could have been a great budget phone just if Sony had paid a little attention on its camera and RAM department. It’s screen size is perfect for one hand use, it’s very portable and lightweight. I thought, this phone is going to be a ‘little big wonder’ but instead it turned out to be a ‘little big disappointment’ for me.
Build Quality
Sony Xperia E4G is small but it’s also kind of bulky and wide. But still better than most phones in terms of one hand use all thanks to its modest size of screen and small bezels. It would’ve been nice if the side bezels were also a little small. It’s back is made of matte plastic and is removable but the battery is not removable. It’s 10.8mm thick and weighs around 145 grams.
Design wise it has one flaw, its volume button placement. You see, this phone is not that big and there’s no point in placing it below the power button. Instead of helping you, it will end up being in your way most of the time and you will end up pressing it accidentally. Not that big of an issue but it’s still very annoying. And it does have a notification LED
Display
It’s screen size is one of its main usp. It a 4.7 inch display of qHD resolution with scratch resistant glass on top. It has quite good viewing angles too so even though it’s not mentioned on the website or on the box, i would still say that it’s an IPS display. It’s pretty bright and at full brightness its sunlight readability is good too. Automatic brightness always keeps it low to save battery life though, so if you want a bright screen you might want to tick off that automatic brightness.
Camera
Camera of Sony Xperia E4G is not good at all. And not just one of them, both of them. It has an auto focus 5MP rear facing camera with LED flash and a very mediocre 2MP front camera. There are only two scenarios in which its main camera could take good photos one is in bright daylight and second one is surprisingly enough, with flash. As you can see in the photos below it picks up more details with flash than without no matter what the lighting conditions are. In low light it becomes a noisy mess with almost no details in the photo. Its front camera takes blurry photos and not really good for ‘selfies’ but then what else do you expect from a 2MP camera?
Its back camera can shoot video up-to 1080p but it has a auto focus problem. Still camera also has that problem but its not as severe as in its video camera option. Whenever a moving object move out of its center of field it become out of focus. As you can see in the video below. Either its auto focus is very sensitive or it just can’t focus properly. it takes video in MP4 format so if you are able to focus it somehow the might come out good.
Here’s something, while playing around with the camera, i found that it comes with “auto mode” on by default if you turn it off and select manual settings instead, it could improve the photo quality a lot and also could fix the auto focus issue to an extent. But still to have a perfectly focused photo, you have to time it well, ’cause like i said, it can fix the issue to an extent, not completely.
Multimedia
It comes with Walkman app which does its work properly. You can see it in action in the review video. Sony Xperia E4G might be the best sounding budget smartphone right now. Or at least best out of all that i have tested lately. Its external speaker could have been a little better though. Its music quality through its speaker is nowhere even close to its music quality through earphones. Video wise, it could play full HD videos without any issues. ‘
OS/RAM/Storage
It runs on Android version 4.4.4 with Sony’s own Xperia UI on top which is fluid. But then comes the RAM to stop its ‘fluidity’. You know i could tell you not buy this phone based on its RAM management alone. It has around 890MB of total RAM out of which the amount of RAM available for the user is around 250MB which is a joke in this day and age. You know never when it will get full and your whole UI will choke with it. It hardly ever slow downs the phone instead it straight up crashes the app. This phone is in dire need of more RAM but since its a phone it’ nevr going to get it. Storage wise it has 8GB of internal memory(expandable) out of which you’ll get around 4GB free and it does support move to SD but USB OTG is not supported.
Price to performance ratio
You know the chip-set of this phone saved it from becoming a laggy mess. If it wasn’t for Mediatek 6732 this phone won’t be able to operate smoothly even while doing a simple task like scrolling from one app page to another. Sony tried its best to make it perform as bad as possible by providing such low amount of RAM, but raw power is a thing you know. And that raw power alone saved it from becoming a ridiculously weak and slow phone.
Mediatek 6732 by the way consists of quad-core Cortex A53 processor clocked at 1.5GHz and Mali T760MP2 GPU. And due this combination it’s price to performance is good. Obviously it is good when it can GTA San Andreas as maximum settings without a single frame drop or stuttering. It’s price to performance could have been way better though, if it had 2GB or at least 1.5GB of RAM.
Connectivity
Sony Xperia E4G is a 4G LTE and dual sim(micro sim) phone. Apart from that, it also have WiFi, WiFi direct, DLNA Bluetooth 4.1, Screen mirroring, throw and various other connectivity options with Sony devices. Call quality is good, both through the ear piece and the mic. It has dual band WiFi so its WiFi performance is very good. It downloads very fast and hardly ever loses connection.
Battery
It comes with 2,300 mAh battery. Which from a glance doesn’t look enough but because of Sony’s proper software optimization. It performs exceptionally well, except if you are not constantly playing games on it. To give you an idea an hour of gaming with WiFi on/off will cost you around 10-15% out of total battery. So that means just while playing only games on it you can expect around 6 hours of battery life. Now, with stamina mode on that number could increase even more, but then the performance will take a little hit though which is always the trade off to save battery life. It even has something called “ultra stamina mode”.
Verdict
This phone is not for gamers and it is definitely not for people that love to take photos of stuff and themselves. There are a few reasons to buy this phone though, first one being portability and comfortable one hand use, not everyone likes a phone with 5.5 inch screen you know. And then it’s made by Sony, so reliability of a trusted brand and also you don’t have to worry about finding its service centers and all that. I wouldn’t recommend it though even for less than 10,000 Rupees. Unless they improve its RAM management through software update or something. My verdict is a no for this phone.
One reply on “Sony Xperia E4G Review”
For just 120 euro (less than moto G 2013) it seems to be a great buy !