Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Sony laptop battery
Sony's latest handset's claim to fame is its appearance in the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, handled by no lesser a man's man than Daniel Craig himself. The phone actually appears for only a handful of seconds, while Bond toys with it alone at a bar (presumably, like every loner out there, to keep other people from talking to him). But while the choice of celebrity association is beyond reproach, we found many of its features fall short of the power and ease of use implied by its honorific.
The Xperia TL back has a very subtle concave shape. When it's laid on its back on a table, only the bottom edge and the rear camera touch. The back is slightly rubberized, soft, and feels comfortable to hold in portrait orientation. (But if you so happen to hold it in landscape, it can feel a little like a boomerang.) One of the finer points of its design is the haptic feedback: shallow, tight vibrations that ring through the phone when we type or select items.
Aping a layout more typical of Windows Phone handsets, the sleep button is in the center of the right hand side, above the volume rocker and hardware camera button. A headphone jack is on the top right corner and the microUSB port is embedded with battery like Sony VGP-BPS26 battery, Sony VGP-BPS26A battery, Sony PCGA-BP3T battery, Sony VGP-BPS7 battery, Sony VGN-TZ121 battery, Sony VGN-G1KAP battery, Sony PCGA-BP52A battery, Sony PCGA-BP52 battery, Sony PCG-X505 battery, Sony VGP-BPS1 battery, Sony PCG-1G1N battery on the left-hand side. On the upper right side, a trapdoor flips open to reveal the SIM and microSD slots. The obvious undocumented storage use cases here: appropriately-shaped cyanide pills, tiny spare GPS radio for concealing about your person when you know your phone will be confiscated by Soviets, breath strips.
Per the phone's heritage, it comes out of the box with the iconic gun-barrel image as the home screen background and a default notification sound of James Bond-y twanging guitars. A few other Bond elements come preloaded: more backgrounds with a gold-coated woman holding a silenced PP7 or Daniel Craig brooding out a window; stills from Skyfall in a photo album; a James Bond theme ringtone.
If you are disenchanted with the default Play Music app, Sony places a Walkman-branded one front and center to manage your music catalog. This, sadly, improves the experience in no appreciable way. In theory, the app can connect to your Facebook account and show music that friends have shared, but it appears to require that those friends share that music through their own Walkman-branded app. Dare to dream, Sony.
The Xperia TL's 4.6-inch 1280x720 screen is very crisp, and text throughout the OS looks great. By default, pages sometimes render strangely in the browser with very tiny text that only flows across half the screen (so once you zoom in, you have edge-to-edge text that's a readable size). The phone is running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich—not the latest Android OS by a few months now, though Sony promises Jelly Bean is coming.
The Xperia TL boasts a 13-megapixel camera on the rear that can record 1080p video. Many phone manufacturers have made a point of improving their camera apps over the last year, adding features like continuous background shooting that allows users to scroll back and forward in time for a better shot or near instantaneous shot-to-shot lags.
The Xperia TL's camera has no such improvements; shot-to-shot times remain a bit slow and the app itself is pretty bare-bones beyond the usual Android offerings (panoramas, smile detection, self-timer, and so on). Still, the Xperia TL turns out some decent photos even in low-light scenarios. We found that it can't resolve bright lights as well as the iPhone 4S's camera can.