Sony Xperia E3 Review

You can call Sony Xperia E3 the ‘meh’ phone. Meh because, the kind of specs this phone has you’d probably have heard of thousand times before. The only thing special about Xperia E3 is its price and the fact that it is made by Sony. Which is not so special any more. But at least its build quality is better than most of the similarly priced devices.

Build Quality

The material that Sony Xperia E3’s back is made of is not that great, it’s rough, rubberized plastic or polymer. But, the way it is made is very solid as expected from Sony. That’s what you pay for when you buy a Sony device. And like i said in my unboxing video, it looks exactly like a small Xperia Z3 the only difference is that it is made of cheap material while Xperia Z3 is made of premium material but then again Xperia Z3 is a flagship device so that is expected.

One thing that bugs me about Xperia E3’s design is that its bezels are unnecessarily big making the whole phone look big even though it doesn’t even have that big of a display. It is not an unibody phone, as some might think when they look at it the first time. Its back does come off but the battery is non-removable. It is only 8.5mm thick and weigh around 143 grams. Other than that it also has notification LED around the top left corner of the phone.

Display

Sony Xperia E3’s display is of 4.5 inches and it does have IPS technology. The resolution 854×480 or FWVGA. This is actually the best LCD display i have ever seen in a budget Sony device ever. It’s definitely way better than Xperia M’s display. Its colour reproduction is very good, you could even set the colour gamut as your liking in the display settings. If you like more yellowish tint, you can do that or if you like bluish tint on your screen then you can set it to do that. Viewing angles are also good, all in all the screen is the best part of Xperia E3 in my opinion.

Camera

Well, Sony Xperia E3’s 5MP auto focus camera is a typical budget smartphone camera. I know because i have been reviewing a lot of budget phones lately and all of them have one similarity. They all takes good photos in broad daylight or sun light. But put them in tight lighting condition and they will start showing their budget camera colours(that was a metaphor). Or rather no colours just noise and lack of details. It doesn’t pick up that much details in good light anyway.

Its auto-focus could be a little problematic sometimes. The problem is, it’s very sensitive. Even after you touch to focus on an object its auto-focus could make it go out of focus. So, be attentive and keep your eyes on screen otherwise the photos will come out of focus. Xperia E3’s video quality isn’t that great either. It does take videos in full HD resolution but the quality is just like this phone ‘meh’. You can see for yourself in the review video below. It also has 0.3MP or rather VGA front camera to capture your teeth in low resolution, so that germs wouldn’t show.

Multimedia

All Sony Xperia phones come feature packed with multimedia features like Walkman app, Movies app, Sony’s Jive app(subscription based) free music listening and downloading app. And Xperia E3 is no exception it comes with all those and its music quality is very good. I am talking about in ear quality right now. Its very clear. Funny enough, even without turning “ClearAudio” on. And i would suggest you to keep it off. But then again every person has its own taste so you configure it as you like. It can play 1080p videos in its default video player without any problems and because of its screen quality the videos look beautiful.

OS/Storage/RAM

Sony Xperia E3 runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat with Sony’s own Xperia UI on top which runs very smooth. No lags whatsoever. It’s optimized to the core for Snapdragon 400. It comes with 1GB of RAM out of which you’ll get around 400MB free. And out of 4GB of total internal storage, you’ll get only around 1GB free. Which is very bad because all the apps installs in that 1GB of memory and 1GB is not enough for apps especially in today’s date. The reason it comes with less internal storage is because a lot of bloatware comes pre-installed with it. Some of it you can remove, some of it you can’t. It comes with small/mini apps, like browser, calculator and such which you can open on top of other apps.

Performance

The processor/chipset Sony Xperia E3 comes with is Snapdragon 400 which has quacore Cortex A7 processor clocked at 1.2GHz and Adreno 305GPU. Since this processor is so widely used from low-end to high-end smartphones. Almost every app in Play Store will is optimized to run smoothly on it. So, in a sense you can say the performance is good of this phone. But its performance isn’t future proof. The moment developers stop optimizing apps for this chipset.

It will have a hard time keeping up with more capable chipsets/processors. Chipsets with raw power. Snapdragon 400 simply doesn’t have that raw performance power. But Xperia E3 is a budget phone so it is not supposed to be future proof especially not from company’s point of view.

Communication

Sony Xperia E3 comes in two versions. One is dual sim and other one is not. The one i am reviewing is single sim. There’s a thousand rupees or approx $20 difference between both. The mic and ear-piece quality is clear. Wifi connectivity is fast. Sometimes when locked it looses the Wifi signal for some reason. The Wifi icon stays there but its not lit up. It looks greyed. It also has NFC and exclusive Xperia connectivity options.

Battery performance

The battery size of Xperia E3(not physical talking in terms of capacity) is 2330 mAh. Which is more than enough for the processor Xperia E3 have and on top of that it has power saving options. Like stamina mode. Company suggested talk-time of E3 is around 12 hours which is easily achievable if you don’t push the phone to do only one thing at a time. Like play games with Wifi on brightness set to full then the battery definitely won’t last you 12 hours or even 8. But still on any type of use it will last you minimum 7 hours. And if you use it wisely or on Stamina mode you might be able to take out more than 12 hours best case scenario you won’t have to charge it everyday. On heavy use though you’ll have to charge it everyday.

Verdict/Choice

If you are looking to update from Xperia M and want to update to a Sony phone only. Then this phone is the best choice in this price range. But if you don’t care about Sony’s name and looking for a phone with much more raw performance power and a much bigger screen like the ones with octa-core Mediatek chipsets. Then you might think, why does this phone even exist? What is the point of it? The point is those whom don’t like or trust local companies but doesn’t have the budget to buy a decent smartphone from companies from Samsung, HTC, Nokia/Microsoft then this is the best you could get. It’s definitely better Samsung Galaxy Core 2 or any other Samsung phone in this price range. Ultimately, the choice is yours. If you any queries about Xperia E3 just ask in the comments below and i will try my best to clear your doubts.