The Sony Xperia P, like the rest of the NXT series, runs Android Gingerbread 2.3.7 with an ICS update coming up in a couple of months. Having seen the same UI combo on both the Xperia S and the sola, let's cut straight to the demo video.
The Xperia P has the usual five-pane homescreen (you can't add or delete panes), with four docked shortcuts (two on either side of the launcher shortcut). These are visible on all five homescreen panes and are user configurable: they can be either single icons or folders with multiple items in them.
The homescreen does a neat trick called Overview mode. Pinch to zoom out on any of the 5 homescreen panes and a new screen opens up with a cool transition. All active widgets gather there for easy viewing and selection.
The Xperia P has some custom-made Sony widgets in addition to the standard set. Those include the Timescape widget (there's a dedicated app too) and a Mediascape-like widget for photos and videos (the actual app isn't there anymore, the standard gallery is back).
Widgets menu • Removing widget
The lockscreen shows notifications for Facebook events too. A cool new addition to the lockscreen, unseen in the old Xperia line, is the music player widget, which lets you control music playback without unlocking the phone - we'll get back to this further on.
The standard notification area and task switcher are of course present and accounted for - no custom touches to them.
The lockscreen • Lockscreen notifications • The standard notification area and task switcher
The Sony Xperia P, just like the Xperia sola, is powered by a dual-core NovaThor U8500 processor clocked at 1 GHz and 1 GB of RAM. Those aren't the kind of specs to set the world alight but they are more than decent, as the benchmark results suggest.
We ran our usual round of benchmarks and compared the Xperia P to the Xperia sola and Sony's current flagship, the Xperia S, as well as a selection of popular upper-midrange competitors..
Starting with BenchmarkPi, which measures the CPU computing power of the NovaThor U8500 chipset, the Xperia P does slightly better than the sola, but nothing overly dramatic.
Lower is better
In Linpack the Xperia P is just behind the Xperia sola, and ahead of the HTC One V and the Samsung Galaxy S Advance, but did worse than the rest.
Higher is better
SunSpider favors the superior JavaScript performance of Ice Cream Sandwich so the Xperia P, just like the sola, is at a slight disadvantage here.
Lower is better
The Xperia P scores quite low at the BrowserMark HTML5 test, beating only the HTC One V.
Higher is better
NenaMark 2 is where the GPU gets to show its worth. Sony's Xperia P scored 29.9 fps, which is better than the Xperia sola, but notably worse than the Samsung Galaxy S II, which uses the same Mali 400-MP GPU.
Higher is better
The Xperia P is well-equipped to tackle routine tasks. It fails to match the speed and capacity of some of the competition, most notably the HTC One S, but that's something only for the most demanding of power users to worry about.
Tip us
1.9m 150k
RSS
EV
Merch
Log in I forgot my password Sign up