Sony Xperia Sola
We discuss the Sony Xperia Sola today in 'The forgotten smartphone'. The phone appeared in 2012, which was right around the time Sony Ericsson switched to the Sony brand name. As such, the Sony Xperia Sola was one of the models first released without the 'Ericsson' suffix. What remained was the familiar green logo in which the 'S' and 'E' were joined together in a circular shape. A striking feature of the Sola was its fresh design, in which it looked like the screen was 'glued' to the casing. This gave an extra depth effect to the phone.
At the time, Sony released several smartphones with a transparent, glowing strip under the screen. We saw this on the Xperia S and the Xperia P, for example. With this Sola, this was no longer the case, and the manufacturer opted for an elongated LED bar under the screen, which could also light up when new notifications were received. What was interesting was the presence of 'Floating Touch'. This allowed you to control the screen without touching the screen itself. This could be used, for example, to select a link in the browser, or to navigate, without tapping. The feature was nice, but its operation was limited and mostly a gimmick. Glove Touch allowed you to operate the screen with a glove on, handy for winter.
Sony provided the Xperia Sola with a 3.7-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 854 x 480 pixels. The screen received positive reviews and had high brightness, for example, which was useful on sunny days. The smartphone featured a NovaThor U8500 dual-core chipset, 512MB of working memory and 8GB of storage. For photos, there was a 5-megapixel main camera with 720p HD filming capability. A selfie lens was to be missed.
The Sola was further equipped with 3G network support and, of course, there was Bluetooth and WiFi. Notable was the presence of NFC, which was unique at the time. Among other things, you could use Smart Tags for this, tags you could scan for information. This was a Sony product and was regularly included with the device. The battery capacity of 1320 mAh was quite limited. Out of the box, the phone, which circulated in the rumour circuit under the name Pepper, ran on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Later, an update to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich appeared. The phone came on the market for around 320 euros.
Sony Xperia Sola summarised in 3 points:
- Floating Touch
- Special design
- No selfie camera
